Taylor Curley

Air Force Research Laboratory | WPAFBRL

Individuals’ thoughts often wander during sustained attention tasks, particularly when the task at hand is understimulating and monotonous (Smallwood & Schooler, 2015). Often, these episodes are directed toward segments of music that are recalled involuntarily, sometimes called “earworms” (Halpern & Bartlett, 2011). While earworms are a normal phen...

Cognitive architectures (CAs) have been instrumental in integrating a wide range of findings in cognitive science into unified theories of cognition. However, much less effort has been devoted to applying CAs to social phenomena, despite the high interdependence between cognitive and social processes in real-world scenarios (e.g., Ecker et al., 202...

Introduction: There is a need to develop a comprehensive account of time-on-task fatigue effects on performance (i.e., the vigilance decrement) to increase predictive accuracy. We address this need by integrating three independent accounts into a novel hybrid framework. This framework unites (1) a motivational system balancing goal and comfort driv...

This study evaluated an intervention to improve remembering in everyday life, the Everyday Memory and Metacognitive Intervention (EMMI). EMMI uses strategies designed to enhance everyday remembering and self-regulatory approaches to monitor goal pursuit, anticipate, and address memory demands. A randomized controlled trial compared a group assigned...

Performance on the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT; Dinges & Powell, 1985)-a common index of sustained attention-is affected by the opposing forces of fatigue and sustained effort, where reaction times and error rates typically increase across trials and are sometimes offset by additional efforts deployed toward the end of the task (i.e., an "end-s...

Sustained attention is a mentally taxing process that occurs in myriad operations in military and industrial environments, resulting in important performance and safety implications. Vigilance tasks are especially demanding given the infrequency of critical signals during sustained attention. Individuals commonly exhibit increases in response varia...

Performance on the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT; Dinges and Powell, 1985) - a common index of sustained attention - is affected by the opposing forces of fatigue and sustained effort, where reaction times and error rates typically increase across trials and are sometimes offset by additional efforts deployed toward the end of the task (i.e., an...

Previous research using goal-directed computational models has demonstrated that microlapses, or brief disruptions in ef-fortful cognitive processing, are related to decreases in vigilance as a function of time-on-task in the psychomotor vigilance test (PVT) (Veksler and Gunzelmann, 2018). We extended these computational accounts of fatigue to mode...

Age leads to increases in memory interference – an effect that has been continuously demonstrated using retroactive and proactive interference paradigms. One potential exception is output interference (OI), which is marked by gradual declines in memory for related items across successive trials. Earlier research has demonstrated that young and olde...

Output interference (OI) is a gradual decline in memory accuracy as a function of an item’s position in a testing sequence (M. C. Anderson & Neely, 1996). Despite having been researched for over 50 years (e.g., Tulving & Arbuckle, 1963), this effect has yet to be linked to metacognitive experiences. The current study examines differences in memory...

Older adults often demonstrate a monitoring deficit by producing more high-confidence memory errors on recognition memory tests. To eliminate lower memory performance by older adults (OA) as a candidate explanation, we studied how distinctive encoding enhances the retrieval-monitoring accuracy in older adults and younger adults (YA) under different...

We report two experiments investigating why learners, in making metacognitive judgments, often seem to ignore or otherwise fail to appreciate that feedback following retrieval practice provides a restudy opportunity. Learners practiced word pairs for a final cued-recall test by studying each pair initially, making a judgment of learning (JOL), and...

This paper describes normative data for newly collected exemplar responses to 70 semantic categories described in previous norming studies (Battig & Montague, Journal of Experimental Psychology, 80(3, pt.2): 1-46, 1969; Van Overschelde, Rawson, & Dunlosky, Journal of Memory and Language, 50(3): 289-335, 2004; Yoon et al., Psychology and Aging, 19(3...

This paper describes normative data for newly collected exemplar responses to 70 semantic categories described in previous norming studies (Battig & Montague, 1969; Van Overschelde, Rawson, & Dunlosky, 2004; Yoon et al., 2004). These categories were presented to 246 Young (18 – 39 years), Middle (40 – 59 years), and Older (60 years and older) Engli...

Medical educators have acknowledged the importance of simulation training in developing procedural skills. While simulation training in other disciplines has benefitted from evaluations of users' skill acquisition, the majority of medical training simulators continue to be developed from overly simplified descriptions of procedures, such as techniq...

Older adults produce more high-confidence recognition memory errors in episodic memory tasks. We studied how distinctive encoding enhances the retrieval-monitoring accuracy in older adults (OA) and younger adults (YA). Individuals viewed words consisting of four randomly selected exemplars (e.g., SALMON, BASS, PERCH, SHARK) from a taxonomic categor...

A Warfighter in a combat environment is expected to continuously search his or her visual field to maintain situational awareness. Misidentification of relevant stimuli, such as failure to detect an enemy combatant or incorrect identification of a friend as an enemy, has costly results for the Warfighter and associated team members. By-products of...

The control of junctional hemorrhage, a serious life-threatening issue facing combat personnel, has benefited from recent technological advances such as the development of the SAM® Junctional Tourniquet (SJT) and Abdominal Aortic Junctional Tourniquet (AAJT™). Applying these devices correctly is challenging, and existing training processes are high...

As infants develop phonetic categories, they must overcome immense contextual variability in speech. A notoriously difficult challenge occurs for the acquisition of vowels, where differences in women’s and men’s voices cause overlap between categories. We propose a solution that is both developmentally plausible and computationally tractable. Our a...

When learners can self-schedule the second presentation of a to-be-learned pair (i.e., choose the spacing), their choices depend on the nature of the expected second presentation. When a restudy opportunity is expected, they choose a long spacing for all items, especially the hardest. When a practice test is expected, they choose a short spacing fo...