This study addressed the role of goal representation in preschoolers' inhibition and flexibility performance. A total of 56 4- and 5-year-olds were tested in an adapted version of the Shape School task where the difficulty of goal representation was manipulated by varying the degree of transparency of task cues. The findings showed that both age…

Previous research has demonstrated that, presumably as a way to protect one's current romantic relationship, individuals involved in a heterosexual romantic relationship tend to give lower attractiveness ratings to attractive opposite-sex others as compared to uninvolved individuals (i.e., the "derogation effect"). The present study importantly…

In reaction time research, there has been an increasing appreciation that response-initiation processes are sensitive to recent experience and, in particular, the difficulty of previous trials. From this perspective, the authors propose an explanation for a perplexing property of masked priming: Although primes are not consciously identified,…

Verbal short-term memory (VSTM) is thought to play a critical role in language learning. It is indexed by the nonword repetition task where listeners are asked to repeat meaningless words like "blonterstaping". The present study investigated the effect on nonword repetition performance of differences in efficiency of functioning of some part of…

This theoretical paper discusses some conceptual and methodological obstacles that one encounters when analyzing the contextual determination of thinking in psychology. First, we comment upon the various representations of the "cognitive" individual that have been formed over the years--from the epistemic subject to the psychological subject, and…

There is an increasing line of evidence supporting the idea that the formation of lasting memories involves neural activity preceding stimulus presentation. Following this line, we presented words in an incidental learning setting and manipulated the prestimulus state by asking the participants to perform either an emotional (neutral or emotional)…

Part- and whole-task conditions were created by manipulating the presence of certain components of the Space Fortress video game. A cognitive model was created for two-part games that could be combined into a model that performed the whole game. The model generated predictions both for behavioral patterns and activation patterns in various brain…

Neuroimaging tests of sensorimotor theories of semantic memory hinge on the extent to which similar activation patterns are observed during perception and retrieval of objects or object properties. The present study was motivated by the hypothesis that some of the seeming discrepancies across studies reflect flexibility in the systems responsible…

Much is written regarding the associations between human intelligence and cognition. However, it is unusual to find comprehensive studies. Here twenty four measures tapping eight cognitive abilities and skills are considered for assessing a sample of one hundred and eighty five young adults. The simultaneous relationships among fluid,…

There is considerable debate on whether working memory (WM) storage is mediated by distinct subsystems for auditory and visual stimuli (Baddeley, 1986) or whether it is constrained by a single, central capacity-limited system (Cowan, 2006). Recent studies have addressed this issue by measuring the dual-task cost during the concurrent storage of…

The goal of the presented experiments was to investigate the dynamic interplay of task shielding and its relaxation during task switching. Task shielding refers to the finding that single task sets in terms of 2-choice categorization rules help shielding against distraction from irrelevant stimulus attributes. During task switching, this shielding…

Previous research on feedback frequency suggests that more frequent feedback improves learning and task performance (Salmoni, Schmidt, & Walter, 1984). Drawing from resource allocation theory (Kanfer & Ackerman, 1989), we challenge the "more is better" assumption and propose that frequent feedback can overwhelm an individual's cognitive resource…

"Working memory" is usually defined in cognitive psychology as a system devoted to the simultaneous processing and maintenance of information. However, although many models of working memory have been put forward during the last decades, they often leave underspecified the dynamic interplay between processing and storage. Moreover, the account of…

Special processes recruited during the recognition of personally familiar people have been assumed to reflect the rich episodic and semantic information that selectively represents each person. However, the processes may also include person nonselective ones, which may require interpretation in terms beyond the memory mechanism. To examine this…

Fox, Ericsson, and Best's (2011) thoughtful justification of the use of think-aloud protocols for revealing the stream of consciousness comes on the centennial of the death of William James, history's greatest practitioner and advocate of introspection. This confluence naturally invites speculation about how James might have responded to the…