Peter F. Delaney

Education and Professional Experience: 1990-1994: Carnegie-Mellon University, B.S. Cognitive Science, Pittsburgh, PA ; 1994-1997: Florida State University, M.S. Cognitive and Behavioral Science, Tallahassee, FL ; 1997-2000: Florida State University, Ph.D. Cognitive Psychology, Tallahassee, FL ; 2000-2005: Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of Florida, Gainesville, FL ; 2005-2009: Assistant Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC ; 2009-: Associate Professor in Cognitive Psychology, Department of Psychology, University of North Carolina at Greensboro, Greensboro, NC. Research Interest : Our lab is involved in educationally-relevant research on how people learn new ways to solve problems and study information. Our laboratory studies seek to discover how to improve learning and problem-solving skills in people of all ages.

There are 17 included publications by Peter F. Delaney :

TitleDateViewsBrief Description
Can encoding differences explain the benefits of directed forgetting in the list-method paradigm? 2003 4436 We propose that the benefits of directed forgetting are explained by the differences in recall arising from individual strategy choices used to encode List 2. In Experiment 1, inducing participants to encode both lists using the same strategy (either...
Directed forgetting in incidental learning and recognition testing: Support for a two-factor account 2005 5172 Instructing people to forget a list of items often leads to better recall of subsequently studied lists (known as the benefits of directed forgetting). The authors have proposed that changes in study strategy are a central cause of the benefits (L. ...
Encoding strategy changes and spacing effects in the free recall of unmixed lists 2005 3721 Memory for repeated items often improves when repetitions are separated by other items—a phenomenon called the spacing effect. In two experiments, we explored the complex interaction between study strategies, serial position, and spacing effects. Whe...
Immediate and sustained effects of planning in problem solving 2004 3451 In 4 experiments, instructions to plan a task (water jugs) that normally produces little planning altered how participants solved the problems and resulted in enhanced learning and memory. Experiment 1 identified planning strategies that allowed part...
Intentional Forgetting Is Easier After Two “Shots” Than One* 2008 3275 Are some things easier to deliberately forget than others? We will propose that the answer to this question is yes and that the kinds of things easier to forget may provide important clues as to how intentional forgetting occurs. Such efforts are tim...
Item-Specific Encoding Produces an Additional Benefit of Directed Forgetting : Evidence From Intrusion Errors 2010 2174 List-method directed forgetting involves encoding 2 lists, between which half of the participants are told to forget List 1. When participants are free to study however they want, directed forgetting impairs List 1 recall and enhances List 2 recall i...
Lasting reductions in illegal moves following increasing their cost: Evidence from river-crossing problems 2005 2119 Improving problem solving requires understanding what difficulties people have when they approach novel problems. Some of the known difficulties include identifying and understanding the operators (Kotovsky & Simon, 1990) or having implicit but wrong...
Oh, Honey, I Already Forgot That : Strategic Control of Directed Forgetting in Older and Younger Adults* 2008 2619 This article is about age-related differences in intentional forgetting of unwanted information. Imagine receiving medication and reading the directions on how to take it. Afterwards, the doctor tells you to take a different dosage at a different tim...
Rehearsal strategies can enlarge or diminish the spacing effect: Pure versus mixed lists and encoding strategy 2009 4555 Using 5 experiments, the authors explored the dependency of spacing effects on rehearsal patterns. Encouraging rehearsal borrowing produced opposing effects on mixed lists (containing both spaced and massed repetitions) and pure lists (containing on...
Remembering to Forget: The Amnesic Effect of Daydreaming 2010 9429 Daydreaming mentally transports people to another place or time. Many daydreams are similar in content to the thoughts that people generate when they intentionally try to forget. Thus, thoughts like those generated during daydreaming can cause forget...
Reminders can enhance or impair episodic memory updating: a memory-for-change perspective 2019 1452 The Memory-for-Change framework proposes that retrieving episodic memories can facilitate new learning when changes between existing memories and new information are integrated during encoding and later recollected. Four experiments examined whether ...
Rote rehearsal and spacing effects in the free recall of pure and mixed lists 2008 3634 The spacing effect is the commonly observed phenomenon that memory for spaced repetitions is better than memory for massed repetitions. To further investigate the role of rehearsal in spacing effects, three experiments were conducted. With pure lists...
The selective directed forgetting effect: Can people forget only part of a text? 2009 4780 Participants studied sentences describing two different characters and then were told to forget the sentences about only one of the characters. A second list contained sentences attributed to a third character. Subsequently, they received a recall te...
Self-evaluation as a moderating factor of strategy change in directed forgetting benefits 2004 2487 In list method directed forgetting, instructing people to forget a studied word list usually results in better recall for a newly studied list. Sahakyan and Delaney (2003) have suggested that these benefits are due to a change in encoding strategy th...
The strategy-specific nature of improvement: The power law applies by strategy within task 1998 3927 If strategy shifts speed up performance, learning curves should show discontinuities where such shifts occur. Relatively smooth curves appear consistently in the literature, however. To explore this incongruity, we examined learning when multiple str...
Uncovering the structure of a memorist's superior "basic" memory capacity 2004 4317 After extensive laboratory testing of the famous memorist Rajan, Thompson, Cowan, and Frieman (1993) proposed that he was innately endowed with a superior memory capacity for digits and letters and thus violated the hypothesis that exceptional memory...
Unexpected costs of high working memory capacity following directed forgetting and context change manipulations 2007 2581 Greater working memory capacity is usually associated with greater ability to maintain information in the face of interruptions. In two experiments, we found that some types of interruptions actually lead to greater forgetting among high-span people ...