We proposeand experimentally testa mnemonic variant of password security that uses game positions as passwords. In Experiment 1, we report accuracy and reaction time data when high school student, younger adult, and older adult participants remembered and entered one gamebased password, using chess or Monopoly. In Experiment 2, we report accuracy and reaction time data from participants' use of five game-based passwords across 24 sessions over 10 weeks. All five passwords were stored in chess or Monopoly for the initial 20 sessions, and changed (from chess to Monopoly or vice versa) for the remaining sessions. This new approach to password security is both mathematically robust and user-friendly.

We examined whether timbre (instrument), pitch level, or both influence gender ratings of musical instruments. According to previous research, a variety of musical instruments are categorized or rated as masculine, neutral, or feminine in a relatively consistent way. Gender associations to musical instruments have been rather reliable across time and across participant populations. We investigated the gender ratings of nine musical instruments (three masculine, three neutral, and three feminine) each heard at low, medium, and high pitch levels within the playable range of each instrument. Both timbre and pitch level influenced participants' gender ratings. The effect of timbre is consistent with results of previous studies, further demonstrating that participants rate instruments fairly consistently. One novel finding is that pitch level also played a role in participants' gender ratings. The ratings of all instruments heard in low pitch levels were shifted in the masculine direction, and the ratings of all instruments heard in high pitch levels were shifted in the feminine direction. These results provide evidence for the notion that participants are influenced by associations to both timbre and pitch level when rating musical instruments on gender.

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Previous spoken word recognition research using the long-term repetition-priming paradigm found performance costs for stimuli mismatching in talker identity. That is, when words were repeated across the two blocks, and the identity of the talker changed reaction times (RTs) were slower than when the repeated words were spoken by the same talker. Such performance costs, or talker effects, followed a time course, occurring only when processing was relatively slow. More recent research suggests that increased explicit and implicit attention towards the talkers can result in talker effects even during relatively fast processing. The purpose of the current study was to examine whether word meaning would influence the pattern of talker effects in an easy lexical decision task and, if so, whether results would differ depending on whether the presentation of neutral and taboo words was mixed or blocked. Regardless of presentation, participants responded to taboo words faster than neutral words. Furthermore, talker effects for the female talker emerged when participants heard both taboo and neutral words (consistent with an attention-based hypothesis), but not for participants that heard only taboo or only neutral words (consistent with the time-course hypothesis). These findings have important implications for theoretical models of spoken word recognition.

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