The aim of this study was principally to assess the impact of sleep deprivation on interference performance in short Stroop tasks (Color-Word, Emotional, and Specific) and on subjective anxiety. Subjective sleepiness and performance on a psychomotor sustained attention task were also investigated to validate our protocol of sleep deprivation.…

Nerve conduction velocity (NCV) and efficiency of synaptic transmission are two possible biological mechanisms that may underpin intelligence. Direct assessments of NCV, without synaptic transmission, show few substantial or reliable correlations with cognitive abilities ["Intelligence" 16 (1992) 273]. We therefore assessed the latencies…

In serial choice reaction time (RT) tasks, performance in each trial critically depends on the sequence of preceding events. In this study, the authors specifically examined the mechanism underlying RT sequence effects at short response-stimulus intervals (RSIs), in which performance is impaired in the current trial N if events alternate rather…

E. Hazeltine, D. Teague, and R. B. Ivry have presented data that have been interpreted as evidence against a central bottleneck. This article describes simulations of their Experiments 1 and 4 in the ACT-R cognitive architecture, which does possess a central bottleneck in production execution. The simulation model is capable of accounting for the…

This article reinvestigates the claim by P. Verhaeghen, J. Cerella, and C. Basak (2004) that the focus of attention in working memory can be expanded from 1 to 4 items through practice. Using a modified version of Verhaeghen et al.'s n-back paradigm, Experiments 1 and 3 show that a signature of a one-item focus, the time cost for switching between…

Four lexical decision experiments are reported that use the masked priming paradigm to study the role of letter position information in orthographic processing. In Experiments 1 and 2, superset primes, formed by repetition of 1 or 2 letters of the target (e.g., jusstice-JUSTICE) or by insertion of 1 or 2 unrelated letters (e.g., juastice-JUSTICE),…

Different asymmetries between expansion and contraction (radial motions) have been reported in the literature. Often these patterns have been regarded as implying different channels for each type of radial direction (outward versus inwards) operating at a higher level of visual motion processing. In two experiments (detection and discrimination…

The purpose of this study was to compare the response times of deaf and normal-hearing individuals to the onset of target events in the visual periphery in distracting and nondistracting conditions. Visual reaction times to peripheral targets placed at 3 eccentricities to the left and right of a center fixation point were measured in prelingually…

Cognitive mechanisms underlying repetition priming in picture naming were decomposed in several experiments. Sets of encoding manipulations meant to selectively prime or reduce priming in object identification or word production components of picture naming were combined factorially to dissociate processes underlying priming in picture naming.…

It has been suggested that older adults are more variable in their performance because they are more prone to lapses of either attention or intention. In the present experiment, 9 young and 9 older adults each performed nearly 2,000 trials of a same-different judgment task. As expected, older adults were slower and more variable than young adults.…

Although the role of working memory in sentence comprehension has received substantial attention, the nature of this relationship remains unclear. The purpose of this study was to examine the interaction between general, nonverbal working memory (WM) and sentence parsing (SP) in normal English-speaking adults. Accuracy and reaction times were…

Eye movements are often misdirected toward a distractor when it appears abruptly, an effect known as oculomotor capture. Fundamental differences between eye movements and attention have led to questions about the relationship of oculomotor capture to the more general effect of sudden onsets on performance, known as attentional capture. This study…

Competitive Scrabble players spend a mean of 4.5 hr a week memorizing words from the official Scrabble dictionary. When asked if they learn word meanings when studying word lists, only 6.4% replied "always," with the rest split between "sometimes" and "rarely or never." Number of years of play correlated positively with expertise ratings,…

Verbal fluency is a widely used neuropsychological paradigm. In fMRI implementations, conventional unpaced (self-paced) versions are suboptimal due to uncontrolled timing of responses, and overt responses carry the risk of motion artifact. We investigated the behavioral and neurofunctional effects of response pacing and overt speech in semantic…

Bilingual children often outperform monolingual children in tasks of cognitive control. This advantage may be a consequence of the fact that bilinguals have more practice controlling attention due to an ongoing need to manage two languages. However, existing evidence is limited because possible differences in ethnicity and socioeconomic status…