The divergent predictions of 2 models of dual-task performance are investigated. The central bottleneck and central capacity sharing models argue that a central stage of information processing is capacity limited, whereas stages before and after are capacity free. The models disagree about the nature of this central capacity limitation. The…

The model of a single central bottleneck for human information processing is critically examined. Most evidence cited in support of the model has been observed within the overlapping tasks paradigm. It is shown here that most findings obtained within that paradigm and that were used to support the model are also consistent with a simple resource…

Two studies examined conditional reasoning with false premises. In Study 1, 12- and 16-year-old adolescents made "if-then" inferences after producing an alternative antecedent for the major premise. Older participants made more errors on the simple modus ponens inference than did younger ones. Reasoning with a false premise reduced this effect.…

It has been suggested that older adults are more variable in their performance because they are more prone to lapses of either attention or intention. In the present experiment, 9 young and 9 older adults each performed nearly 2,000 trials of a same-different judgment task. As expected, older adults were slower and more variable than young adults.…

Although the role of working memory in sentence comprehension has received substantial attention, the nature of this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between general, nonverbal working memory (WM) and sentence parsing (SP) in normal English-speaking adults. Accuracy and reaction times were…

Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary. When asked if they learn word meanings when studying word lists, only 6.4% replied "always," with the rest split between "sometimes" and "rarely or never." Number of years of play correlated positively with expertise ratings,…

Verbal fluency is a widely used neuropsychological paradigm. In fMRI implementations, conventional unpaced (self-paced) versions are suboptimal due to uncontrolled timing of responses, and overt responses carry the risk of motion artifact. We investigated the behavioral and neurofunctional effects of response pacing and overt speech in semantic…

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status…

In individuals with autism or autism-spectrum-disorder (ASD), conflicting results have been reported regarding the processing of biological motion tasks. As biological motion perception and recognition might be related to impaired imitation, gross motor skills and autism specific psychopathology in individuals with ASD, we performed a functional…

Cognitive performance is affected by an individual's characteristics and the environment, as well as by the nature of the task and the amount of practice at it. Mental performance tests range in complexity and include subjective estimates of mood, simple objective tests (reaction time), and measures of complex performance that require decisions to…

The aim of the study was to investigate the developmental trajectory of error monitoring. For this purpose, children (age 7-8), young adolescents (age 13-14) and adults (age 23-24) performed a Go/No-Go task and were compared on overt reaction time (RT) performance and on event-related potentials (ERPs), thought to reflect error detection…

The Zahlen-Verbindungs-Test (ZVT) represents a highly feasible measure of information-processing speed that correlates quite highly with standard psychometric tests of intelligence. The present study was designed to identify specific stages of the sensorimotor processing system that may account for individual differences in overall variability of…

Three pairs of spatial antonyms (higher than/lower than, above/below, and rising away from/falling away from) were used in a task in which subjects judged whether a sentence accurately described a previously presented pictorial relationship. Subjects' reaction times were used as the dependent measure. Since all three word pairs were used…