In order to determine the processing stage that is responsible for the effect of mood states on the breadth of attentional focus, we recorded event-related potentials from 18 students who performed a flanker task involving adjacent letters. To induce a specific mood state, positive, neutral, or negative affective pictures were presented repeatedly…

Working memory is devoted to the temporary storage and on-line manipulation of information. Recently, an integrative system termed the episodic buffer has been proposed to integrate and hold information being entered or retrieved from episodic memory. Although the brain system supporting such an integrative buffer is still in debate, the medial…

A review of recent large-scale studies on gender differences in processing speed and on the cognitive factors assumed to affect processing speed was performed. It was found that females have an advantage in processing speed tasks involving digits and alphabets as well as in rapid naming tasks while males are faster on reaction time tests and…

This article reviews research on working memory (WM) and its use in second language (L2) acquisition research. Recent developments in the model and issues surrounding the operationalization of the construct itself are presented, followed by a discussion of various methods of measuring WM. These methods include word and digit span tasks, reading,…