It has been suggested that the Stroop task gives rise to 2 conflicts: the information conflict (color vs. word meaning) and the task conflict (name the color vs. read the word). However, behavioral indications for task conflict (reaction time [RT] congruent condition longer than RT neutral condition) appear under very restricted conditions. We…

Evidence shows that visual working memory (VWM) is strongly served by attentional mechanisms, whereas other evidence shows that VWM representations readily survive when attention is being taken away. To reconcile these findings, we tested the hypothesis that directing attention away makes a memory representation vulnerable to interference from the…

Perception and action are closely related. Responses are assumed to be represented in terms of their perceptual effects, allowing direct links between action and perception. In this regard, the integration of features of stimuli (S) and responses (R) into S-R bindings is a key mechanism for action control. Previous research focused on the…

The genetic diversity contained in a population can be used to engage the audience in an understanding of human genotypes and phenotypes. With a series of simple examples of well-documented sensory phenotypes related to the perception of colour, aromas or food preference, the diversity of the audience can be easily explored. The collecting of…

The present work investigated possible temporal constraints on the posthypnotic word blindness suggestion effect. In a completely within-subjects and counterbalanced design 19 highly suggestible individuals performed the Stroop task both with and without a posthypnotic suggestion that they would be unable to read the word dimension of the Stroop…

This study used canonical correlation analysis to explore the relation among scores on the Torrance test of figural and verbal creativity and demographic, psychological and physiological measures in Swedish product-development engineers. The first canonical variate included figural and verbal flexibility and originality as dependent measures and…

It is well established that a task-irrelevant sound (deviant sound) departing from an otherwise repetitive sequence of sounds (standard sounds) elicits an involuntary capture of attention and orienting response toward the deviant stimulus, resulting in the lengthening of response times in an ongoing task. Some have argued that this type of…

In a variety of conflict paradigms, target and distractor stimuli are defined in terms of perceptual features. Interference evoked by distractor stimuli tends to be reduced when the ratio of congruent to incongruent trials is decreased, suggesting conflict-induced perceptual filtering (i.e., adjusting the processing weights assigned to stimuli…

How does executive attentional control contribute to memory for sequences of visual objects, and what does this reveal about storage and processing in working memory? Three experiments examined the impact of a concurrent executive load (backward counting) on memory for sequences of individually presented visual objects. Experiments 1 and 2 found…

Accounts of task-set control generally assume that the current task's stimulus-response (S-R) rules must be elevated to a privileged state of activation. How are they represented in this state? In 3 task-cuing experiments, we tested the hypothesis that phonological working memory is used to represent S-R rules for task-set control by getting…

Inhibition of return (IOR) occurs when a target is preceded by an irrelevant stimulus (cue) at the same location: Target detection is slowed, relative to uncued locations. In the present study, we used relatively complex displays to examine the effect of repetition of nonspatial attributes. For both color and shape, attribute repetition produced a…

In the laboratory, people classify the color of emotion-laden words slower than they do that of neutral words, the emotional Stroop effect. Outside the laboratory, people react to features of emotion-laden stimuli or threatening stimuli faster than they do to those of neutral stimuli. A possible resolution to the conundrum implicates the…

Developmental dyscalculia (DD) is a deficit in number processing and arithmetic that affects 3-6% of schoolchildren. The goal of the present study was to analyze cerebral bases of DD related to symbolic number processing. Children with DD aged 9-11 years and matched children with no learning disability history were investigated using fMRI. The two…

In this study, we investigated the relationships between rapid naming of letters, digits and colours, and reading ability and executive function. We gave fifty-six grade three and four children rapid automatised naming tasks using letters and digits as stimuli, executive function measures including the Stroop task, a working memory task and the…

The purpose of the present study was to extend previous research on reinforcer assessment by comparing effectiveness of stimuli identified by two preference procedures on teaching figure coloring to three children with disabilities in Turkey; and to find out what special education teachers think about social validation of the two preference…