We examined whether fluid intelligence (Gf) is better predicted by the storage capacity of active memory or by the effectiveness of executive control. In two psychometric studies, we measured storage capacity with three kinds of task which required the maintenance of a visual array, the monitoring of simple relations among perceptually available…

Background: Attention biases toward threat are often detected in individuals with anxiety disorders. Threat biases can be measured experimentally through dot-probe paradigms, in which individuals detect a probe following a stimulus pair including a threat. On these tasks, individuals with anxiety tend to detect probes that occur in a location…

Does extensive practice reduce or eliminate central interference in dual-task processing? We explored the reorganization of task architecture with practice by combining interference analysis (delays in dual-task experiment) and random-walk models of decision making (measuring the decision and non-decision contributions to RT). The main delay…

The dual-stage two-phase (DSTP) model is introduced as a formal and general model of selective attention that includes both an early and a late stage of stimulus selection. Whereas at the early stage information is selected by perceptual filters whose selectivity is relatively limited, at the late stage stimuli are selected more efficiently on a…

There is evidence that the efficiency of selective attention depends on the availability of cognitive control mechanisms as distractor processing has been found to increase with high load on working memory or dual task coordination (Lavie, Hirst, de Fockert, & Viding, 2004). We tested the prediction that cognitive control load would also…