The hypothesis that brain activity may differ during varied types of video game play was investigated in two studies of event-related potentials exhibited by children age 7 to 12 when processing game-based stimuli requiring correct/incorrect responses or choices between two imaginative alternative responses. The first study had 22 children of…

Recent empirical and theoretical work suggests that visual features such as color and orientation can be stored or retrieved independently in visual working memory (VWM), even in cases when they belong to the same object. Yet it remains unclear whether different feature dimensions have their own capacity limits, or whether they compete for shared…

Posterror slowing (PES) refers to an increased response time following errors. While PES has traditionally been attributed to control adjustments, recent evidence suggested that PES reflects interference. The present study investigated the hypothesis that control and interference represent 2 components of PES that differ with respect to their time…

Maljkovic and Nakayama (1994) found that pop-out search performance is more efficient when a singleton target feature repeats rather than switches from 1 trial to the next--an effect known as priming of pop-out (PoP). They also reported findings indicating that the PoP effect is strongly automatic, as it was unaffected by knowledge of the upcoming…

Working memory is a basic cognitive process that predicts higher-level skills. A central question in theories of working memory development is the generality of the mechanisms proposed to explain improvements in performance. Prior theories have been closely tied to particular tasks and/or age groups, limiting their generalizability. The cognitive…

This study investigated whether language control during language production in bilinguals generalizes across modalities, and to what extent the language control system is shaped by competition for the same articulators. Using a cued language-switching paradigm, we investigated whether switch costs are observed when hearing signers switch between a…

Three experiments investigated the learning of simple associations in a color-word contingency task. Participants responded manually to the print colors of 3 words, with each word associated strongly to 1 of the 3 colors and weakly to the other 2 colors. Despite the words being irrelevant, response times to high-contingency stimuli and to…

Results from a number of studies indicate that the use of drafting models can positively influence the spatial visualization ability for engineering technology students. However, additional variables such as light, temperature, motion and color can play an important role but research provides inconsistent results. Considering this, a set of 5…

Individuals with greater cognitive abilities generally show reduced rates of mind-wandering when completing relatively demanding tasks (Randall, Oswald, & Beier, 2014). However, it is yet unclear whether elevated rates of mind-wandering among low-ability individuals are manifestations of deliberate, intentional episodes of mind-wandering…

In this article, we demonstrate limitations of accessibility of information in visual working memory (VWM). Recently, cued-recall has been used to estimate the fidelity of information in VWM, where the feature of a cued object is reproduced from memory (Bays, Catalao, & Husain, 2009; Wilken & Ma, 2004; Zhang & Luck, 2008). Response…

The purpose of this study was to compare the acute effects of Aerobic Exercise (AE), Resistance Exercise (RE), and a nonexercise (NE) control on measures of academic achievement (AA) and cognition in 10th grade males and females. This study utilized a randomized crossover design. Tenth grade males and females performed three exercise trials (AE,…

Joint attention--the mutual focus of 2 individuals on an item--speeds detection and discrimination of target information. However, what happens to that information beyond the initial perceptual episode? To fully comprehend and engage with our immediate environment also requires working memory (WM), which integrates information from second to…

Inhibition is often conceptualized as a unitary construct reflecting the ability to ignore and suppress irrelevant information. At the same time, it has been subdivided into inhibition of prepotent responses (i.e., the ability to stop dominant responses) and resistance to distracter interference (i.e., the ability to ignore distracting…

Stimulus-response (S-R) episodes are formed whenever a response is executed in close temporal proximity to a stimulus. Subsequent stimulus repetition will retrieve the episode from memory, reactivating the previous response. Whereas many research findings attest to the flexibility of representing stimulus features, only little is known about the…

This current study examined human children's and adults' automatic processing of proportion using a Stroop-like paradigm. Preschool children and university students compared the areas of two sectors that varied not only in absolute areas but also in the proportions they occupied in their original rounds. A congruity effect was found in both age…