Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of human cognition often associated with the withdrawal of task-related executive control processes. Here, we explore the possibility that, in tasks requiring executive control to sustain consistent responding, moments of mind wandering could be associated with moments of increased behavioral variability. To…

The current study focuses on the relationship between alerting and executive attention. Previous studies reported an increased flanker congruency effect following alerting cues. In the first two experiments, we found that the alertness-congruency interaction did not exist for all executive tasks (it appeared for a flanker task but not for a Stroop…

Although dual-task interference is ubiquitous in a variety of task domains, stop-signal studies suggest that response inhibition is not subject to such interference. Nevertheless, no study has directly examined stop-signal performance in a dual-task setting. In two experiments, stop-signal performance was examined in a psychological refractory…

Lien, Ruthruff, Remington, & Johnston (2005) reported residual switch cost differences between stimulus-response (S-R) pairs and proposed the partial-mapping preparation (PMP) hypothesis, which states that advance preparation will typically be limited to a subset of S-R pairs because of structural capacity limitations, to account for these…