Responding to a prospective memory task in the course of an ongoing activity requires switching tasks, which typically comes at a cost in performing the ongoing activity. Similarly, when the prospective memory task is deactivated, a cost can occur when previously relevant prospective memory targets appear in the course of the ongoing activity. In…

Several working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenance of information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these 2 functions of WM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examining whether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have…

The development of error monitoring is central to learning and academic achievement. However, few studies exist on the neural correlates of children's error monitoring, and no studies have examined its susceptibility to educational influences. Pedagogical methods differ on how they teach children to learn from errors. Here, 32 students (aged 8-12…

This case study analyzed the cognitive strategies of Ethan, a gifted youth, when performing a Stop Signal Task assessing cognitive control processes including response inhibition as well as proactive and reactive adjustments of response. In the case of Ethan, the response inhibition score was biased, revealing that Ethan did not follow the…

Research on emotion inferences has shown that readers include a representation of the main character's emotional state in their mental representations of the text. We examined the specificity of emotion representations as a function of the emotion content of short narratives, in terms of the quantity and quality of emotion components included in…

The study investigated the effect of selection cues in working memory (WM) on the fate of not-selected contents of WM. Experiments 1A and 1B showed that focusing on 1 cued item in WM does not impair memory for the remaining items. The nonfocused items are maintained in WM even when this is not required by the task. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that…

The present study aimed at modeling individual differences in a verbal learning task by means of a latent structured growth curve approach based on an exponential function that yielded 3 parameters: initial recall, learning rate, and asymptotic performance. Three cognitive variables--speed of information processing, verbal knowledge, working…

In the Simon effect, participants make a left or right keypress in response to a nonspatial attribute (e.g., color) that is presented on the left or right. Reaction times (RTs) increase when the response activated by the irrelevant stimulus location and the response retrieved by instruction are in conflict. The authors measured RTs and movement…