We used a technique known as reach tracking to investigate how individual differences in working memory capacity (WMC) relate to the functioning of two processes proposed to underlie cognitive control: a threshold adjustment process that temporarily inhibits motor output in response to signals of conflict and a controlled selection process that…

The ability to enact cognitive control under changing environmental demands is commonly studied using set-shifting paradigms. While the control processes required for task set reconfiguration (switch costs) have been studied extensively, less research has focused on the control required during task repetition in blocks containing multiple tasks as…

Understanding fraction magnitudes is important for achievement and in daily life. However, adults' fraction reasoning sometimes appears to reflect whole number bias and other times reflects accurate reasoning. In the current experiments, we examined how contextual factors and individual differences in executive functioning (Experiment 1),…

Response control or inhibition is one of the cornerstones of modern cognitive psychology, featuring prominently in theories of executive functioning and impulsive behavior. However, repeated failures to observe correlations between commonly applied tasks have led some theorists to question whether common response conflict processes even exist. A…

Classic studies reveal two striking differences between preschoolers and adults in online sentence comprehension. Adults (a) recruit referential context cues to guide syntactic parsing, interpreting an ambiguous phrase as a modifier if a modifier is needed to single out the intended referent among multiple options, and (b) use late-arriving…

An important question within psycholinguistics is how knowledge of multiple languages impacts the coactivation of word forms and meanings during language comprehension. To the extent that a bilingual's known languages are always partially active, as predicted by models such as the bilingual interactive activation plus model (Dijkstra & Van…

Chuderski and Jastrzêbski (2017) found a positive relationship between working memory capacity and insight problem solving, and concluded that "people with less effective cognition" are therefore "less creative" (p. 2003). This interpretation discounts substantial evidence that devoting less executive control facilitates…

Speech is more difficult to understand when it is presented concurrently with a distractor speech stream. One source of this difficulty is that competing speech can act as an attentional lure, requiring listeners to exert attentional control to ensure that attention does not drift away from the target. Stronger attentional control may enable…

According to some accounts, the bilingual advantage is most pronounced in the domain of executive attention rather than inhibition and should therefore be more easily detected in conflict adaptation paradigms than in simple interference paradigms. We tested this idea using two conflict adaptation paradigms, one that elicits a list-wide…

We propose that attraction errors in agreement production (e.g., the key to the cabinets are missing) are related to two components of executive control: working memory and inhibitory control. We tested 138 children aged 10 to 12, an age when children are expected to produce high rates of errors. To increase the potential of individual variation…

Models of bilingual reading such as Bilingual Interactive Activation Plus (Dijkstra & van Heuven, 2002) do not predict a central role for domain-general executive control during bilingual reading, in contrast with bilingual models from other domains, such as production (e.g., the Inhibitory Control Model; Green, 1998). We thus investigated…

What are the mechanisms underlying search in social memory (e.g., remembering the people one knows)? Do the search mechanisms involve dynamic local-to-global transitions similar to semantic search, and are these transitions governed by the general control of attention, associated with working memory span? To find out, we asked participants to…

Several judgment and decision-making tasks are assumed to involve memory functions, but significant knowledge gaps on the memory processes underlying these tasks remain. In a study on 568 adults between 25 and 80 years of age, hypotheses were tested on the specific relationships between individual differences in working memory, episodic memory,…

The ability to temporarily maintain information in order to successfully perform a task is important in many daily activities. However, the ability to quickly and accurately update existing mental representations in distracting situations is also imperative in many of these same circumstances. In the current studies, individuals varying in working…