Purpose: Emotional processing allows us to predict our own and others' behavior, communicate our wants and needs, and understand those of others. Thus, deficits in emotional processing can negatively impact one's quality of life. While changes in emotional processing across several domains (e.g., prosody, faces) in Parkinson's disease (PD) are…

The current study provides a methodological review of studies supporting a general factor of intelligence as the primary model for contemporary measures of cognitive abilities. A further evaluation is provided by an empirical evaluation that compares statistical estimates using different approaches in a large sample of children (ages 9-13 years, N…

Process-Overlap Theory (POT) suggests that measures of cognitive abilities sample from sets of independent cognitive processes. These cognitive processes can be separated into domain-general executive processes, sampled by the majority of cognitive ability measures, and domain-specific processes, sampled only by measures within a certain domain.…

Cognitive assessment in natural group settings facilitates data collection but poses threats to the validity. In this study, tablet-based working memory (WM) tasks, the counting span, and reading span were used in predicting 12-year-old children's (N = 837) scholastic skills and fluid intelligence in a classroom with environmental noise. WM tasks…

This study investigated the processes reflected in the widely observed N400 and P600 event-related potential (ERP) effects and tested the hypothesis that the N400 and P600 effects are functionally linked in a tradeoff relationship, constrained in part by individual differences in cognitive ability. Sixty participants read sentences, and ERP…

This study examines the relation between the error-related negativity (ERN) and post-error behavior over time in healthy young adults (N = 61). Event-related brain potentials were collected during two sessions of an identical flanker task. Results indicated changes in ERN and post-error accuracy were related across task sessions, with more…

The ability to temporarily maintain information in order to successfully perform a task is important in many daily activities. However, the ability to quickly and accurately update existing mental representations in distracting situations is also imperative in many of these same circumstances. In the current studies, individuals varying in working…

Processes engaged when information is encoded into memory are an important determinant of whether that information will be recovered subsequently. Also influential, however, are processes engaged at the time of retrieval, and these were investigated here by using event-related potentials (ERPs) to measure a specific class of retrieval operations.…

Residents (N=27) of a Jewish home for the aged were given a battery of 25 tests of cognitive abilities. There were marked individual differences among participants. Poorer performance was associated with carrying a diagnosis of organic brain syndrome and with a number of other background variables. (Author)

Discusses the problems of using chronometric analysis, a common cognitive psychological method, for educational assessment. Suggests that cognitive assessment has not reached the precision needed to analyze individual differences. (FMW)

Comparisons between individuals who attempt suicide and those who complete suicide have shown that the two groups are not necessarily from the same population. Similar comparisons have not been reported between attempters and individuals who voice thoughts of suicide but make no overt attempt (ideators). Since therapists are commonly required to…

This study investigated whether a unitary elemental process or several independent processes underlie psychometric "g" (factor of general intelligence). Results with 101 college students administered 2 intelligence tests and a large battery of elementary cognitive tasks suggest that as many as 4 independent components make up…

Responses of 241 convicts on 18 primary mental abilities were factored to explore the idea that there are organizations among visual and auditory functions that operate independently from the relation-perceiving and correlate-educing functions of fluid and crystallized intelligence. The suggested reliable common-factor functions are discussed.…

Individual differences in verbal/analytic and nonverbal/holistic cognitive strategies were studied in relationship to performance levels in spatial tasks, sex and handedness. Analytic processes are described as sequential, resulting in decomposition of stimulus information, and holistic processes, as parallel, involving information synthesis.…

Averaged evoked potential (AEP) is an event-related brain response obtained by averaging the scalp electrical potentials elicited by repeated presentations of the same event. It has proven to be an accurate measure of the activity of the mature human brain when involved in a wide variety of psychological tasks. Distinct psychological processes…