The effect of recent experience on current behavior has been studied extensively in simple laboratory tasks. We explore the nature of sequential effects in the more naturalistic setting of automobile driving. Driving is a safety-critical task in which delayed response times may have severe consequences. Using a realistic driving simulator, we find…

Understanding (a) how responses become prepotent provides insights into when inhibition is needed in everyday life. Understanding (b) how response prepotency is overcome provides insights for helping children develop strategies for overcoming such tendencies. Concerning (a), on tasks such as the day-night Stroop-like task, is the difficulty with…

When the time interval between two peripheral stimuli is long enough, reaction times (RTs) to targets presented at previously stimulated locations are longer than RTs to targets presented at new locations. This effect is widely known as "Inhibition of Return" (IOR). The effect is usually explained as an inhibitory bias against…

This study investigated the internal reliability, temporal stability and plasticity of commonly used measures of inhibition-related functions. Stop-signal, go/no-go, antisaccade, Simon, Eriksen flanker, Stroop and Continuous Performance tasks were administered twice to 23 healthy participants over a period of approximately 11 weeks in order to…

In some cochlear implant users, success is not achieved in spite of optimal clinical factors (including age at implantation, duration of rehabilitation and post-implant hearing level), which may be attributed to disorders at higher levels of the auditory pathway. We used cortical auditory evoked potentials to investigate the ability to perceive…

Purpose: Apraxia of speech (AOS) is considered a speech motor programming impairment, but the specific nature of the impairment remains a matter of debate. This study investigated 2 hypotheses about the underlying impairment in AOS framed within the Directions Into Velocities of Articulators (DIVA; Guenther, Ghosh, & Tourville, 2006) model: The…

Typing performance involves hierarchically structured control systems: At the higher level, an outer loop generates a word or a series of words to be typed; at the lower level, an inner loop activates the keystrokes comprising the word in parallel and executes them in the correct order. The present experiments examined contributions of the outer-…

Flanker congruency effects were measured in a masked flanker task to assess the properties of spatial attention during conscious and nonconscious processing of form, color, and conjunctions of these features. We found that (1) consciously and nonconsciously processed colored shape distractors (i.e., flankers) produce flanker congruency effects;…

A multitude of models have been proposed to account for the neural mechanism of value integration and decision making in speeded decision tasks. While most of these models account for existing data, they largely disagree on a fundamental characteristic of the choice mechanism: independent versus different types of competitive processing. Five…

If the diffusion model (Ratcliff & McKoon, 2008) is to account for the relative speeds of correct responses and errors, it is necessary that the components of processing identified by the model vary across the trials of a task. In standard applications, the rate at which information is accumulated by the diffusion process is assumed to be normally…

Mind wandering is a pervasive feature of human cognition often associated with the withdrawal of task-related executive control processes. Here, we explore the possibility that, in tasks requiring executive control to sustain consistent responding, moments of mind wandering could be associated with moments of increased behavioral variability. To…

Purpose: The present study investigated phonological encoding skills in children who stutter (CWS) and those who do not (CNS). Participants were 9 CWS (M=11.8 years, SD=1.5) and 9 age and sex matched CNS (M=11.8 years, SD=1.5). Method: Participants monitored target phonemes located at syllable onsets and offsets of bisyllabic words. Performance in…

This article describes a recent Oxfordshire Big Science Event (BSE), which was combined with Science Week in Bure Park Primary School and involved a competition in which primary school children throughout Oxfordshire devised, carried out, and recorded data from science investigations to answer questions that interested them. Teams of children…

The present research examines the nature of the different processes that have been proposed to underlie semantic priming. Specifically, it has been argued that priming arises as a result of "automatic target activation" and/or the use of strategies like prospective "expectancy generation" and "retrospective semantic…

Researchers have extensively documented how various statistical properties of words (e.g., word frequency) influence lexical processing. However, the impact of lexical variables on nonword decision-making performance is less clear. This gap is surprising, because a better specification of the mechanisms driving nonword responses may provide…