The primary aim of the present research was to determine how "stimulus-set" and "response-set" components of task-set contribute to switch costs and conflict processing. Three experiments are described wherein participants completed an explicitly cued task-switching procedure. Experiment 1 established that task switches requiring a reconfiguration…

Perceived brightness is well described by Stevens' power function (S. S. Stevens, 1957, On the psychophysical law, "Psychological Review", Vol. 64, pp. 153-181), with a power exponent of 0.33 (the cubic-root function of luminance). The power exponent actually varies across individuals, yet little is known about neural substrates underlying this…

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…

One important debate in psycholinguistics concerns the nature of morphological decomposition processes in visual word recognition (e.g., darkness = {dark} + {-ness}). One theory claims that these processes arise during orthographic analysis and prior to accessing meaning (Rastle & Davis, 2008), and another argues that these processes arise through…

Withholding an action plan in memory for later execution can delay execution of another action, if the actions share a similar (compatible) action feature (i.e., response hand). This phenomenon, termed compatibility interference (CI), was found for identity-based actions that do not require visual guidance. The authors examined whether CI can…

The ability to attend to relevant events and to ignore irrelevant stimuli is crucial to survival. Theories disagree on whether this ability is dependent solely on increased neural activation for relevant items or whether active ignoring can also play a role. The authors examined the active ignoring of stimuli using a preview search procedure,…

A neural model is developed to explain how humans can approach a goal object on foot while steering around obstacles to avoid collisions in a cluttered environment. The model uses optic flow from a 3-dimensional virtual reality environment to determine the position of objects on the basis of motion discontinuities and computes heading direction,…

When presented with alternating low and high tones, listeners are more likely to perceive 2 separate streams of tones ("streaming") than a single coherent stream when the frequency separation ([delta]f) between tones is greater and the number of tone presentations is greater ("buildup"). However, the same large-[delta]f sequence reduces streaming…

In cross-dimensional visual search tasks, target discrimination is faster when the previous trial contained a target defined in the same visual dimension as the current trial. The dimension-weighting account (DWA; A. Found & H. J. Muller, 1996) explains this intertrial facilitation by assuming that visual dimensions are weighted at an early…

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to determine the degree to which people can process words while devoting central attention to another task. Experiments 1-4 measured the N400 effect, which is sensitive to the degree of mismatch between a word and the current semantic context. Experiment 5 measured the P3 difference between…

Recent data have shown that parallel processing by the cerebral hemispheres can expand the capacity of visual working memory for spatial locations (J. F. Delvenne, 2005) and attentional tracking (G. A. Alvarez & P. Cavanagh, 2005). Evidence that parallel processing by the cerebral hemispheres can improve item identification has remained elusive.…

K. Wiegand and E. Wascher (2005) used the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) to investigate the mechanisms underlying spatial stimulus-response (S-R) correspondence. The authors compared spatial S-R correspondence effects obtained with horizontal and vertical S-R arrangements. In some relevant previous investigations on spatial S-R…

A frequency analysis was used to tag cortical activity from imagined rhythmic movements. Participants synchronized overt and imagined taps with brief visual stimuli presented at a constant rate, alternating between left and right index fingers. Brain potentials were recorded from across the scalp and topographic maps made of their power at the…

Neuroimaging studies have frequently observed relatively high activity in medial rostral prefrontal cortex (PFC) during rest or baseline conditions. Some accounts have attributed this high activity to the occurrence of unconstrained stimulus-independent and task-unrelated thought processes during baseline conditions. Here, the authors investigated…

The visual system continually selects some information for processing while bypassing the processing of other information, and as a consequence, participants often fail to notice large changes to visual stimuli. In the present studies, the authors investigated whether knowledge about the probability of particular changes occurring over time…