informed that they would be learning a series of English words paired with point-values, and that they would later be tested on which words they could recognize. Instruc- tions stated that the point-values of correctly recognized words would be added to their score, and that their pri- mary goal was to maximize their score. Participants were also told that they would lose points for incorrectly report- ing that they recognized a word from before when it was actually a new word. Without the prospect of losing points for incorrect guesses, the optimal strategy for earning points would be to rate all items as being previously pre- sented. Next, participants were presented with the 90 study words, each presented randomly and with its own point-value. Words were presented for 2 s, with a fixation cross presented between word-presentations for 0.5 s.

After viewing all study words, participants had to solve a set of 24 basic multiplication and division problems (e.g., 12 � 12 = _____). This was a distractor task to reduce men- tal rehearsal, and performance was not examined in later analysis. This task was designed to take participants roughly 5 min to complete, and there was an ample 30 s time-limit for responding to prevent participants from spending too much time on any one problem.