Previous studies on associative memory's effect on short-term memory (STM) have yielded inconsistent findings (facilitation vs. interference). This inconsistency is particularly pronounced under high memory load conditions that exceed STM capacity. To address this gap, we investigated whether systematically manipulated associative activation (via repetition) and retention interval jointly affect STM under high load. Using a 3 × 3 (activation level [none, low, high] × retention interval [1000, 1500, 3000 ms]) mixed design, participants learned Emoji pairs with 0/8/18 repetitions (training phase) and completed a visual STM recognition task via change detection (8 simultaneous items, test phase). Results showed that high associative activation significantly improved STM performance, reflected by higher capacity (K), discriminability (d'), and accuracy. Critically, this facilitative effect did not interact with retention interval, indicating a robust benefit under high load. These findings advance LTM-STM interplay understanding: highly activated associative LTM representations supplement STM capacity and guide attentional allocation. Future research could explore diverse materials, neurophysiological measures (e.g., EEG), and longer retention intervals to clarify temporal dynamics.

Background: The aim of the study was to identify psychological predictors of specific patterns of play in pay-to-win games: coping strategies and motivation to play. Methods: The article presents the results of an online cross-sectional study conducted among pay-to-win (P2W) gamers (n = 868), defined as those who have made in-game payments to gain an advantage over gamers who refuse to pay. Results: The patterns of P2W gaming differed in their predictors; the pattern of larger contributions was associated with self-enhancement motivation, and the pattern of small, frequent contributions was associated with social motivation and coping directed to escape from problems. Conclusions: Behavioral patterns of gaming are associated with different gaming motivations and strategies. The social factor seemed to differentiate between the most distinct types of players. Recognition of these specific patterns can be an essential factor in adequately understanding P2W gaming behavior. Significance statement: This study advances our understanding of P2W gaming by revealing that distinct psychological mechanisms drive players' spending and engagement patterns. Rather than treating P2W gamers as a uniform group, we demonstrated that self-enhancement motives primarily drive high-spending players. Conversely, players who make frequent but smaller financial contributions use the game to escape real-world problems and satisfy social needs. Crucially, our findings show that social coping, typically a positive trait, can inadvertently lead to excessive gaming when embedded in virtual communities. By identifying these diverse underlying motivations, this research provides essential insights to help clinicians and educators develop targeted, behavior-specific interventions for problematic gaming.

Everyday cognitive control requires the regulation of speed and accuracy, particularly when people encounter response conflict or make errors. Perfectionism is relevant to this regulatory context because it combines standards for performance with individual differences in mistake significance, self-evaluation, and tolerance of failure. However, findings linking perfectionism to conflict processing, error monitoring, post-error adjustment, and cognitive flexibility remain inconsistent. This article offers a theory-driven narrative synthesis and develops a conditional integrative framework rather than a systematic review or a validated mechanistic theory. The framework does not replace conflict-monitoring theory, reinforcement-learning accounts of error processing, or multidimensional models of perfectionism. Instead, it specifies how perfectionistic concerns and perfectionistic strivings may conditionally modulate three components of a monitoring-control loop: monitoring sensitivity, response criterion, and flexible versus rigid implementation of control. I argue that perfectionistic concerns may increase the subjective significance of conflict and errors and, under specific task conditions, bias performance toward costly caution or rigid control. Perfectionistic strivings, when separated from concerns, may be more closely related to goal engagement and performance quality than to error reactivity. The framework is deliberately conditional: its predictions depend on task difficulty, error frequency, instructional emphasis, sample characteristics, measurement reliability, and control of sequential artifacts. The article concludes by outlining core propositions and concise methodological considerations for future empirical tests, emphasizing that methodological precision improves testability but does not substitute for empirical validation.