Carrier and Pashler (1995) concluded--based on locus-of-slack dual-task methodology--that memory retrieval was subject to a central bottleneck. However, this conclusion conflicts with evidence from other lines of research suggesting that memory retrieval proceeds autonomously, in parallel with many other mental processes. In the present…

Stressful situations, the aversiveness of events, or increases in task difficulty (e.g., conflict) have repeatedly been shown to be capable of triggering attentional control adjustments. In the present study we tested whether the particularity of an fMRI testing environment (i.e., EPI noise) might result in such increases of the cognitive control…

The qualitative difference method for distinguishing between aware and unaware processes was applied here to a spatial priming task. Participants were asked simply to locate a target stimulus that appeared in one of four locations, and this target stimulus was preceded by a prime in one of the same four locations. The prime location predicted the…

A growing methodology, known as the systems factorial technology (SFT), is being developed to diagnose the types of information-processing architectures (serial, parallel, or coactive) and stopping rules (exhaustive or self-terminating) that operate in tasks of multidimensional perception. Whereas most previous applications of SFT have been in…

The technique of priming was used to study the nature of the mental representations generated by color names. (Editor)

In three experiments involving situations previously called upon in support of representativeness theory, questionnaire responses from 265 university students demonstrated systematic biases that deviated sharply from the obvious predictions of the theory. The implications for representativeness theory are discussed. (Editor/RK)

From experiments showing that subjects differentially attend to parts of the visual field, psychologists have inferred a limitation on human visual information processing capacity. The model presented describes an optimal way to allocate a limited quantity of "cognitive resources", "attention" or "mental effort". An experiment tests this model.…

Two experiments on divided attention and adult aging are reported that take into account age differences in single-task performance and that measure divided attention independently of resource allocation strategies. No significant age difference in divided attention ability independent of single-task performance level was found in either…

Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy report that semantic context has a larger effect on visually degraded words than on undegraded words. Degrading stimuli takes place by superimposing a dot pattern over letters thereby slowing information processing. Four experiments explore alternative explanations of this research finding. (Editor/RK)

Four commissurotomy patients were tested for ability to match tachistoscopically presented stimuli with pictures in free vision, according to either structural appearance or functional/conceptual category. (Editor)

The physical identity reaction time task used in this study was designed to further test the effect of processing mode uncertainty on visual field asymmetries that Swanson et al. (1974) reported, and to determine the effects of location uncertainty in a cognitive task. (Author/KC)

Subjects were asked to decide if a pair of visually presented letter strings were both words (lexical decision task). Results supported an automatic spread of excitation model of associative facilitation. (Editor/RK)