There is evidence that upright, but not inverted, faces are encoded holistically. The holistic coding of faces was examined in four experiments by manipulating the attention allocated to target faces. In Experiment 1, participants in a divided attention condition were asked to match two upright flanker faces while encoding a centrally presented upright target face. Although holistic coding was ...

The literature on divided attention and adult aging has not taken age differences in single-task performance into account, and it has not been able to measure divided attention independently of resource allocation strategies. Two experiments are reported that controlled for these factors. In the first experiment, young (18-23 years) and old (57-76 years) subjects made responses to two simultane...

Women have been stereotyped as better multitaskers when compared to their male counterparts. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether there are differences in gender performance when performing cognitive combined tasks. Twenty-four graduate students (twelve females and twelve males) volunteered to participate in the study. The task required participants to indicate when they perceiv...

Sense of agency refers to the subjective feeling of controlling events through one's behavior or will. Sense of agency results from matching predictions of one's own actions with actual feedback regarding the action. Furthermore, when an action involves a cued goal, performance-based inference contributes to sense of agency. That is, if people achieve their goal, they would believe themselves t...

For colloquium style presentations where audience attention is voluntary, computing devices present an interesting conundrum. Audience members may benefit from simultaneously using a device to take notes or perform other tasks while still attempting to pay attention to the lecture, but the device may also distract its owner, other audience members, or the speaker. We report on two studies of th...

Numerous studies have investigated the neural substrates supporting cognitive reappraisal, identifying the importance of cognitive control processes implemented by prefrontal cortex (PFC). This study examined how valence and attention affect the processes used for cognitive reappraisal by asking participants to passively view or to cognitively reappraise positive and negative images with full o...

The evidence for and against a redundancy gain in reaction time (RT) when the target is repeated in the visual display is reviewed. We consider the relevance of redundancy gains under these circumstances to the question of whether attention can be simultaneously directed to separate locations in the visual field. In the present experiments, two capital letters were the target stimuli in a two-a...

Performing a secondary task concurrently with a study task has a detrimental effect on later memory for studied items. To investigate the mechanisms underlying this effect, the processing resources available for an incidental encoding task were varied by manipulating secondary task difficulty. fMRI data were acquired as volunteers (n = 16) made animacy decisions to visually presented study word...

Research has demonstrated navigational aids impair spatial memory, but has not considered important spatial cognitive concepts. For example, impairment may stem from spatial perspective switches between route-based aids and survey-based memory assessments. Further, the verbal format of aid instructions may selectively interfere with verbal working memory (VWM). To address these potential explan...