We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate the psychological refractory period (PRP), the delay in the response to the second of two tasks occurring in immediate succession. Our results were consistent with prior work on the PRP in that when two visual-manual tasks were presented within 100 ms of each other, the second response was delayed on the order of 500 ms, compar...

It has been argued that the psychological refractory period (PRP) effect is eliminated with two ideomotor compatible tasks when instructions stress fast and simultaneous responding. Three experiments were conducted to test this hypothesis. In all experiments, Task 1 required spatially compatible manual responses (left or right) to the direction of an arrow, and Task 2 required saying the name o...

In this paper we discuss general properties of geodesic surfaces that are (locally) biLipschitz homogeneous. In particular, we prove that they are locally doubling and there exists a special doubling measure analogous to the Haar measure for locally compact groups.

We show that the string bit model suffers from doubling in the fermionic sector. The doubling leads to strong violation of supersymmetry in the limit N → ∞. Since there is an exact correspondence between string bits and the algebra of BMN operators even at finite N , doubling is expected also on the side of super-Yang–Mills theory. We discuss the origin of the doubling in the BMN sector.

We conducted 2 multitasking experiments to examine the finding that first-task reaction times (RTs) are slower in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm than in the prioritized processing (PP) paradigm. To see whether this difference between the 2 paradigms could be explained entirely by differences in first-task preparation, which would be consistent with the standard response sele...

People often have trouble performing 2 relatively simple tasks concurrently. The causes of this interference and its implications for the nature of attentional limitations have been controversial for 40 years, but recent experimental findings are beginning to provide some answers. Studies of the psychological refractory period effect indicate a stubborn bottleneck encompassing the process of ch...

In a previous paper the authors developed a H−BMO theory for unbounded metric measure spaces (M, ρ, μ) of infinite measure that are locally doubling and satisfy two geometric properties, called “approximate midpoint” property and “isoperimetric” property. In this paper we develop a similar theory for spaces of finite measure. We prove that all the results that hold in the infinite measure case ...

Several recent studies have found markedly increased rates of schizophrenia among West Indian immigrants to the UK. Almost exclusively, authors have sought psychosocial explanations for these findings. This paper hypothesises that environmental causes, notably obstetric complications and perinatal infections, provide more plausible aetiological models, especially for the raised rates of schizop...

The present experiment examined the effects of input/output modality pairings on dual-task performance using the psychological refractory period (PRP) procedure. Four groups of participants performed two tasks composed of the same sets of inputs (visual and auditory) and the same sets of outputs (manual and vocal), but with different input/output modality pairings. Whereas modality pairings had...