Recent Publications

Hennessee, J.P., Schorn, J.M., Walsh, C., Castel, A.D., & Knowlton, B.J. (2024) Goal-directed remembering in older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, & Cognition. 31:891-913.

This paper showed that older adults maintained selectivity to value and that younger and older adults are similarly goal-directed in terms of item features to encode, but that instructions to forget presented items are less effective in older adults

Knowlton, B.J. & Schorn, J.M. (2024) Procedural and motor learning. In M.J. Kahana & A.D. Wagner, (eds.) Oxford Handbook of Human Memory, 2^nd Edition. Oxford University Press, New York, NY, pp 243-266

This chapter is a brief review of current findings and theories on skill learning.

Murphy, D.H., Castel, A.D., & Knowlton, B.J. (2024) Age-related differences in framing: Selective memory in terms of gains and losses. Experimental Aging Research50:506-521

This collaboration with Alan Castel’s lab showed that older adults expected to be more selective when their goals were framed in terms of losses, but younger adults expected to be more selective when their goals were framed in terms of gains. However, both younger and older adults were more selective for high-value information when their goals were framed in terms of maximizing gains compared with minimizing losses. Thus, the framing of learning goals can impact metacognitive decisions and subsequent memory in both younger and older adults

Murphy, D.H., Hoover, K.M., Castel, A.D., & Knowlton B.J. (2024) Memory and automatic processing of valuable information in younger and older adults. Aging, Neuropsychology, & Cognition, 32:142-168.

In this collaboration with Alan Castel’s lab, we showed that the automatic effects of value may have a greater effect on younger adults relative to older adults, but there may be instances where older adults also exhibit these automatic effects.

Franco, C.Y. Serobyan, J., Avetysian, O., & Knowlton, B.J. (2025) Early-life racial/ethnic discrimination effects on behavioral control and health outcomes in young adults. Learning & Memory32: a053927

These results expand on existing literature showing the negative impacts of childhood stressors on behavioral control and real-world outcomes during adulthood

Schorn, J.M. & Knowlton, B.J. (2025) Implicitly learned bias impacts decision-making but not metacognition. Consciousness and Cognition, 131:103857

These results suggest that base-rate priors can be learned implicitly and can bias perceptual decisions, but this bias does not appear to affect confidence.

De Guzman H.P. & Knowlton, B.J. (2025) Procedural Learning. In J.T. Wixted (ed.), Learning and Memory: A Comprehensive Reference, 3^rd Edition. Academic Press, San Diego. pp 231-247.

In this collaboration with Alan Castel’s lab, we showed that if some valuable information  is inherently more difficult to remember, older adults may struggle to adapt their encoding strategy to remember  low-memorability items that are highly valuable. Thus, older adults can use strategic memory processes for high-value information, but the efficacy of this process may depend on the intrinsic and extrinsic salience of the information.

Franco, C.Y. & Knowlton, B.J. (2025). Assessing behavioral control across the adult lifespan using a novel outcome revaluation task. Scientific Reports. 15:45364.

This paper showed  subtle changes in behavioral control across the adult lifespan and supported previous work showing that certain psychological measures including obsessive-compulsive symptoms are associated with increased habitual responding.