Frequent forced switching between tasks has been shown to reduce switch costs and increase voluntary switch rates. So far, however, the boundary conditions of the influence of forced task switching on voluntary task switching are unknown. Thus, the present study was aimed to test different aspects of generalizability (across items, tasks, and…

Individual differences in reading skill have frequently been related to variability in working memory capacity; however, it is unclear what drives this relation. The present study investigated two attentional control mechanisms that may contribute to this relation: proactive control and online filtering. To examine how the neural mechanisms of…

It has been demonstrated that the Simon effect may be increased or reversed due to proportion congruency manipulation, suggesting that learned spatial irrelevant stimulus-response (S-R) associations are used to guide responses. In this study, we tested the hypothesis that learning spatial irrelevant S-R associations by rewards may show a similar…

Semantic distance is a determining factor in cognitive processes, such as semantic priming, operating upon semantic memory. The main computational approach to compute semantic distance is through latent semantic analysis (LSA). However, objections have been raised against this approach, mainly in its failure at predicting semantic priming. We…

Considerable variation in the frequency of left-handedness between cultures has been reported, ranging from 0.5 to 24%. This variation in hand preference may have evolved under natural or cultural selection. It has been suggested that schooling affects handedness but as in most human societies only a selected and minor part of the population does…

Pseudoneglect is traditionally viewed as reflecting right hemisphere specialization for processing spatial information, which brings about relatively greater activation of the right hemisphere and orienting towards the contralateral space. Such interpretation implies that the leftward attentional bias is a population trait. Animal studies,…