Variations in perceptual and cognitive demands (load) play a major role in determining the efficiency of selective attention. According to load theory (Lavie, Hirst, Fockert, & Viding, 2004) these factors (a) improve or hamper selectivity by altering the way resources (e.g., processing capacity) are allocated, and (b) tap resources rather than…

The influence of cardiorespiratory fitness on the modulation of cognitive control was assessed in preadolescent children separated into higher- and lower-fit groups. Participants completed compatible and incompatible stimulus-response conditions of a modified flanker task, consisting of congruent and incongruent arrays, while ERPs and task…

Inhibition of inappropriate responses allows to shape the motor behavior accordingly to the context in which a subject acts and is an essential executive function. Inhibition has been poorly investigated in Down Syndrome (DS) patients. We tested, using a countermanding task, the inhibitory control in a group of DS patients and in a group of…

Throughout middle-childhood, inhibitory processes, which underlie many higher order cognitive tasks, are developing. Little is known about how inhibitory processes change as a task becomes conceptually more difficult during these important years. In adults, as Go/NoGo tasks become more difficult there is a systematic decrease in the P3 NoGo…

Spaced learning usually leads to better recognition memory as compared with massed learning, yet the underlying neural mechanisms remain elusive. One open question is whether the spacing effect is achieved by reducing neural repetition suppression. In this fMRI study, participants were scanned while intentionally memorizing 120 novel faces, half…

Does extensive practice reduce or eliminate central interference in dual-task processing? We explored the reorganization of task architecture with practice by combining interference analysis (delays in dual-task experiment) and random-walk models of decision making (measuring the decision and non-decision contributions to RT). The main delay…

Unagreement patterns consist in a person feature mismatch between subject and verb that is nonetheless grammatical in Spanish. The processing of this type of construction gives new insights into the understanding of agreement processes during language comprehension. Here, we contrasted oscillatory brain activity triggered by Unagreement in…

Schizophrenia may be associated with a fundamental disturbance in the temporal coordination of information processing in the brain, leading to classic symptoms of schizophrenia such as thought disorder and disorganized and contextually inappropriate behavior. However, the majority of studies that have examined timing behavior in schizophrenia have…

Perceiving objects activates the representation of their affordances. For example, experiments on compatibility effects showed that categorizing objects by producing certain handgrips (power or precision) is faster if the requested responses are compatible with the affordance elicited by the size of objects (e.g., small or large). The article…

At near-threshold levels of stimulation, identical stimulus parameters can result in very different phenomenal experiences. Can we manipulate which stimuli reach consciousness? Here we show that consciousness of otherwise masked stimuli can be experimentally induced by sensory entrainment. We preceded a backward-masked stimulus with a series of…

Prepositions combine with nouns flexibly when describing concrete locative relations (e.g. "at/on/in" the school) but are rigidly prescribed when paired with abstract concepts (e.g. "at" risk; "on" Wednesday; "in" trouble). In the former case they do linguistic work based on their discrete semantic qualities, and in the latter they appear to serve…

The main issue of this study was to determine whether cognitive control is affected by acute moderate exercise. Twelve participants [4 females (VO[subscript 2 max]=42 ml/kg/min) and 8 males (VO[subscript 2 max]=48 ml/kg/min)] performed a Simon task while cycling at a carefully controlled workload intensity corresponding to their individual…

Although working memory has a highly constrained capacity limit of three or four items, both adults and toddlers can increase the total amount of stored information by "chunking" object representations in memory. To examine the developmental origins of chunking, we used a violation-of-expectation procedure to ask whether 7-month-old infants, whose…

The current study dissociated and examined the two primary components of the phonological working memory subsystem--the short-term store and articulatory rehearsal mechanism--in boys with ADHD (n = 18) relative to typically developing boys (n = 15). Word lists of increasing length (2, 4, and 6 words per trial) were presented to and recalled by…

We investigated the processing of threat-related, positive, and neutral words in parafoveal and in foveal vision as a function of individual differences in trait anxiety. In a lexical-decision task, word primes were presented for 150 ms either parafoveally (2.2[degrees] away from fixation; Experiment 1) or foveally (at fixation; Experiment 3)…