The apparently deleterious effect of aging on dual-task performance is well established, but there is little agreement about the source of this effect. Studies of the psychological refractory period (PRP) indicate that young adults can flexibly control dual-task performance through task-coordination strategies. Thus, the performance of older adults might differ from young adults because older a...

Why is the human brain fundamentally limited when attempting to execute two tasks at the same time or in close succession? Two classical paradigms, psychological refractory period (PRP) and task switching, have independently approached this issue, making significant advances in our understanding of the architecture of cognition. Yet, there is an apparent contradiction between the conclusions de...

OBJECTIVE To describe Spain's scientific production in the field of bioethics from 1966 to 2003. METHODS Manuscripts published by Spanish authors between 1966 and 2003 and containing key word references to bioethics, ethics, and 22 other related terms were retrieved from the Medline database. RESULTS 858 documents were selected: 78 (9.1%) were published between 1966 and 1983, 163 (19%) betw...

Danish household consumption increased by 58% over the period 1966]1992 while CO2 emissions only increased by 7%. Using decomposition analysis we investigated the global CO impact of Danish household consumption from 1966 to 1992. Our conclusion is that 2 overall growth in private consumption } but not changes in the composition of consumption } is the key to understanding the increase in CO em...

Status epilepticus, meaning either continuous convulsions with unconsciousness or serial epileptic attacks, between which there is no return to consciousness, is always a serious and potentially fatal emergency. It is of special importance in paediatrics, for infants and young children have a lower convulsive theshold than adults, and recent work (Ounsted, Lindsay, and Norman, 1966) has indicat...

It is now generally agreed that the presence of symptoms is an indication for long-term pacing of patients with complete heart block, and that this treatment lowers the mortality considerably (Chardack et al., 1966; Sowton, 1967a). An appreciable proportion of paced patients has intermittent atrioventricular conduction so that if a fixed rate pacemaker is implanted there is competition between ...

Practice can dramatically reduce dual-task interference, but typically does not eliminate interference entirely. Residual interference after practice is especially large with certain non-preferred modality pairings (e.g., auditory-manual and visual-vocal). Does this residual interference imply the existence of a persistent central-processing bottleneck? To address this question, we transferred ...

In this research, the controversial issue of whether the central bottleneck can be bypassed through task automatization was investigated. To examine this issue, participants received six single-task practice sessions with an auditory-vocal task (low vs. high pitch). We then assessed dual-task performance using the analytically tractable psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, in which t...

The authors examined the role of online order control in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. In the first 2 experiments, participants switched between color-letter and letter-color orders so that subtask order was isolated as the only element being switched. The results indicated that order switching impaired the 2 PRP responses and modulated the PRP effect. Importantly, these e...