Applying 10 Hz ([alpha]-rate) sensory stimulation, not 5 Hz ([theta]-rate), prior to introducing novel speech-print pairs can reset the phase of [theta] oscillations and enhance associative learning. This rapid gain indicates coordinated mechanisms to regulate attentional/cognitive resources ([alpha] oscillations) and facilitate memory storage…

Value-directed remembering refers to the tendency to best remember important information at the expense of less valuable information, and this ability may draw on strategic attentional processes. In six experiments, we investigated the role of attention in value-directed remembering by examining memory for important information under conditions of…

Research suggests that forcing participants to withhold responding for as brief as 600 ms eliminates one of the most reliable findings in prospective memory (PM): the cue focality effect. This result undermines the conventional view that controlled attentional monitoring processes support PM, and instead suggests that cue detection results from…

Purpose: Lexical processing impairments such as delayed and reduced activation of lexical-semantic information have been linked to syntactic processing disruptions and sentence comprehension deficits in individuals with aphasia (IWAs). Lexical-level deficits can also preclude successful lexical encoding during sentence processing and amplify the…

Dividing attention (DA) between a memory task and a secondary task results in deficits in memory performance across a wide array of memory tasks, but these effects are larger when DA occurs at encoding than at retrieval. Although some research suggests the effects of DA are equal for item and associative memory, thereby suggesting that DA disrupts…

The systems underlying incremental sentence comprehension are, in general, highly successful -- comprehenders typically understand sentences of their native language quickly and accurately. The occasional failure of the system to deliver an appropriate representation of a sentence is therefore potentially illuminating. There are many ways the…

Students' school requirements and learning activities engage many different cognitive processes, including language processing, memory, learning, attention, reasoning, decision-making, and social interaction. However, students rarely learn about these cognitive processes, or the brain mechanisms underlying them and therefore lack the critical…

One of the best-established findings in intelligence research is the pattern of positive correlations among various intelligence tests. Although this so-called positive manifold became the conceptual foundation of many theoretical accounts of intelligence, the very nature of it has remained unclear. Only recently, "Process Overlap…

While much research shows that early sensory and attentional processing is affected by mind wandering, the effect of mind wandering on deep (i.e., semantic) processing is relatively unexplored. To investigate this relation, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) as participants studied English-Spanish word pairs, one at a time, while being…

In 2 experiments, eye-tracking was used to examine individual differences in attention during encoding and their relation to associative learning. Pupillary responses were used as an indicator of the amount of attention devoted to items, whereas eye fixations provided a means of assessing attentional focus among items within each to-be-remembered…

The present research aimed to investigate how field-dependent and field-independent learners perceived and processed information when they were engaged in an implicit foreign language learning task and to explore differences between them in this regard. The majority of studies in the pertinent literature have adopted quantitative methods to date.…

Participants completed a battery of 3 attentional control (AC) tasks (OSPAN, antisaccade, and Stroop, as in Hutchison, 2007) and performed a lexical decision task with symmetrically associated (e.g., "sister-brother") and asymmetrically related primes and targets presented in both the forward (e.g., "atom-bomb") and backward…

The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is known to be critically involved in strategy switching, attentional set shifting, and inhibition of prepotent responses. A central feature of this kind of behavioral flexibility is the ability to resolve conflicting response tendencies, suggesting a general role of the PFC in resolving interference. If so, the PFC…

Background: Temporal information processing (TIP) underlies many aspects of cognitive functions like language, motor control, learning, memory, attention, etc. Millisecond timing may be assessed by sequencing abilities, e.g. the perception of event order. It may be measured with auditory temporal-order-threshold (TOT), i.e. a minimum time gap…

Children growing up in poverty have a higher likelihood of exposure to multiple forms of adversity that jeopardize their chances of academic success. The current paper identifies school mobility, or changing schools, as 1 such poverty-related risk. Using a sample of low-income, predominantly ethnic-minority children (n = 381) in Chicago, this…