Working memory (WM) enables a rapid access to a limited number of items that are no longer physically present. WM studies usually involve the encoding and retention of multiple items, while probing a single item only. Hence, little is known about how well multiple items can be reported from WM. Here we asked participants to successively report…

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…

Conflict processing is assumed to serve two crucial, yet distinct functions: Regarding task performance, control is adjusted to overcome the conflict. Regarding task choice, control is harnessed to bias decision making away from the source of conflict. Despite recent theoretical progress, until now two lines of research addressed these…

"Guitar Hero III" and similar games potentially offer a vehicle for improvement of musical rhythmic accuracy with training delivered in both visual and auditory formats and by use of its novel guitar-shaped interface; however, some theories regarding multimedia learning suggest sound is a possible source of extraneous cognitive load…

Three experiments examined the immediate free recall (IFR) of auditory-verbal and visuospatial materials from single-modality and dual-modality lists. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with between 1 and 16 spoken words, with between 1 and 16 visuospatial dot locations, or with between 1 and 16 words "and" dots with synchronized…

Although superior visual search skills have been repeatedly reported for individuals with autism spectrum disorder, the underlying mechanisms remain controversial. To specify the locus where individuals with autism spectrum disorder excel in visual search, we compared the performance of autism spectrum disorder adults and healthy controls in…

Structured abstract: Introduction: Difficulties in science and mathematics may stem from intuitive interference of irrelevant salient variables in a task. It has been suggested that such intuitive interference is based on immediate perceptual differences that are often visual. Studies performed with sighted participants have indicated that in the…

Background: The modification of performance following conflict can be measured using conflict adaptation tasks thought to measure the change in the allocation of cognitive resources in order to reduce conflict interference and improve performance. While previous studies have suggested atypical processing during nonsocial cognitive control tasks,…

Distraction during encoding has long been known to disrupt later memory performance. Contrary to this long-standing result, we show that detecting an infrequent target in a dual-task paradigm actually improves memory encoding for a concurrently presented word, above and beyond the performance reached in the full-attention condition. This absolute…