Researchers have only recently started to take advantage of the developments in technology and communication for sharing data and documents. However, the exchange of experimental material has not taken advantage of this progress yet. In order to facilitate access to experimental material, the Bank of Standardized Stimuli (BOSS) project was created as a free standardized set of visual stimuli accessible to all researchers, through a normative database. The BOSS is currently the largest existing photo bank providing norms for more than 15 dimensions (e.g. familiarity, visual complexity, manipulability, etc.), making the BOSS an extremely useful research tool and a mean to homogenize scientific data worldwide. The first phase of the BOSS was completed in 2010, and contained 538 normative photos. The second phase of the BOSS project presented in this article, builds on the previous phase by adding 930 new normative photo stimuli. New categories of concepts were introduced, including animals, building infrastructures, body parts, and vehicles and the number of photos in other categories was increased. All new photos of the BOSS were normalized relative to their name, familiarity, visual complexity, object agreement, viewpoint agreement, and manipulability. The availability of these norms is a precious asset that should be considered for characterizing the stimuli as a function of the requirements of research and for controlling for potential confounding effects.

The authors revisited evidence in favor of modularity and of functional equivalence between the processing of verbal and spatial information in short-term memory. This was done by investigating the patterns of intrusions, omissions, transpositions, and fill-ins in verbal and spatial serial recall and order reconstruction tasks under control, articulatory suppression, and spatial tapping conditions. The authors observed that when tasks were fully equated, all patterns of errors were equivalent between the verbal and spatial domains. Moreover, articulatory suppression interfered more with the verbal memory tasks than with the spatial memory tasks. This interference was mostly due to an increase of omissions and transpositions. Similarly, tapping was more disruptive of spatial memory than of verbal memory tasks and affected primarily the number of omissions and transpositions. The patterns of errors and their interaction with interference are discussed in light of the predominant approaches to modeling memory and provide a rich set of data for modeling efforts.

Over the last decade or so, the Internet has become a privileged media for advertisement. Despite this increase in popularity, several studies suggested that Internet users 'avoid' looking at ads (what is often referred to as the banner blindness phenomena). This conclusion, however, rests mostly on indirect evidence that participants do not remember the ad content. Therefore, it is unclear whether participants actually fixated the ads and how their gaze behaviour is related to memory for the ad. In the present study, we investigated whether Internet users avoid looking at ads inserted on a non-search website using an analysis of eye movements, and if the ad content is kept in memory. Our results show that most participants fixate the ads at least once during their website visit. Moreover, even though the congruency between the ad and the editorial content had no effect on fixation duration on the ad, congruent ads were better memorised than incongruent ads. This study provides a novel and systematic method for assessing the processing and retention of advertisements during a website visit.

In a recent study, Bireta et al. (2010) suggested that when participants are required to recall lists of items in the reverse order, more attention is devoted to the recall of order at the expense of item information, leading to the abolition of item-based phenomena (the item and order trade-off hypothesis). In order to test the item and order trade-off hypothesis, we manipulated 4 lexical factors that are well known to influence item retention. The effects of word frequency, of lexicality, of semantic similarity, and of imageability were tested in forward and backward recall. All 4 phenomena were maintained in backward recall, which contradicts the item and order trade-off hypothesis. Instead, we suggest that backward recall might rely on semantic retrieval strategies.

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