Objectives: To examine college students' conflicting COVID-19 information exposure, information-seeking, concern, and cognitive functioning. Participants: 179 undergraduates were recruited in March-April 2020, and 220 in September 2020 (Samples 1 and 2, respectively). Methods: Students completed the Attention Network Test, NASA Task Load Index,…

Sleep deprivation impairs a wide range of cognitive processes, but the precise mechanism underlying these deficits is unclear. One prominent proposal is that sleep deprivation impairs vigilant attention, and that impairments in vigilant attention cause impairments in cognitive tasks that require attention. Here, we test this theory by studying the…

Younger and older adults are more suggestible to additive (not originally included) versus contradictory (a change to the original) misleading details. Only suggestibility to contradictory misinformation can be reduced with explicit instructions to detect errors during exposure to misinformation. The present work examines how to reduce…

This study measured event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to test competing hypotheses regarding the effects of anger and race on early visual processing (N1, P2, and N2) and error recognition (ERN and Pe) during a sequentially primed weapon identification task. The first hypothesis was that anger would impair weapon identification in a biased…

Experiments were conducted to test a modern exemplar-familiarity model on its ability to account for both short-term and long-term probe recognition within the same memory-search paradigm. Also, making connections to the literature on attention and visual search, the model was used to interpret differences in probe-recognition performance across…

This article describes an initial study of the effect of focused attention on phonological speech errors. In 3 experiments, participants recited 4-word tongue twisters and focused attention on 1 (or none) of the words. The attended word was singled out differently in each experiment; participants were under instructions to avoid errors on the…

Little empirical data are available concerning the cognitive abilities of gifted individuals in general and especially those who excel in mathematics. We examined visual processing abilities distinguishing between general giftedness (G) and excellence in mathematics (EM). The research population consisted of 190 students from four groups of 10th-…

Time Factors (Learning);When the mind wanders, attention turns away from the external environment and cognitive processing is decoupled from perceptual information. Mind wandering is usually treated as a dichotomy (dichotomy-hypothesis), and is often measured using self-reports. Here, we propose the levels of inattention hypothesis, which…

The present study explored the relation between language control and nonverbal cognitive control in different bilingual populations. We compared monolinguals, Dutch-French unbalanced bilinguals, balanced bilinguals, and interpreters on the Simon task (Simon & Rudell, 1967) and the Attention Network Test (ANT; Fan, McCandliss, Sommer, Raz,…

How information is exchanged between the cognitive mechanisms responsible for gaze perception and social attention is unclear. These systems could be independent; the "gaze cueing" effect could emerge from the activation of a general-purpose attentional mechanism that is ignorant of the social nature of the gaze cue. Alternatively, orienting to…

The experiments conducted aimed to investigate whether reduced accuracy when counting stimuli presented in rapid temporal sequence in adults with dyslexia could be explained by a sensory processing deficit, a general slowing in processing speed or difficulties shifting attention between stimuli. To achieve these aims, the influence of the…

Patients with right hemisphere lesions often omit or misread words on the left side of a text or the beginning letters of single words which is termed neglect dyslexia (ND). Two types of reading errors are typically observed in ND: omissions and word-based reading errors. The prior are considered as space-based omission errors on the…

The purpose of this experiment is to test whether shift flexibility in kindergarten children is a joint function of rule-usage and inhibition of attention. Sixty-six children were given either a distraction or facilitation condition in a computerized version of the dimensional change card sort task. In the distraction condition, the background of…

This study examines how conversing with passengers in a vehicle differs from conversing on a cell phone while driving. We compared how well drivers were able to deal with the demands of driving when conversing on a cell phone, conversing with a passenger, and when driving without any distraction. In the conversation conditions, participants were…

Nonroutine problem-solving, too, involves elements of routine. Often, elementary routines such as solving for a variable are not carried out without error. In this paper, we use new findings from neuroscientific research to explain why even excellent students make mistakes in elementary routines. [For complete proceedings, see ED489597.]