In the present study we aimed to determine the attentional cost of postural control during adolescence by studying the influence of a cognitive task on concurrent postural control. 38 teenagers aged 12 to 17years and 13 young adults (mean age=26.1) stood barefoot on a force platform in a semi-tandem position. A dual-task paradigm consisted of performing a Stroop or a COUNTING BACKWARD task whil...

There is currently no consensus on whether the difference between field-dependent and field-independent subjects on tasks of cognitive abilities result from different mental processing strategies, from true group differences in cognitive ability, or from both. School-age children (N = 239) were tested for field dependence/independence using the Children's Embedded Figures Test and for mental-at...

Acetylcholine (ACh) efflux in the frontoparietal cortex was studied with in vivo microdialysis while rats performed in an operant task designed to assess sustained attention. Transferring animals from the baseline environment into the operant chambers elicited a robust increase in cortical ACh efflux that persisted throughout the 18-min pre-task period. Subsequent performance in the 36-min sust...

The sensitivity of tapping task to mental workload was investigated. Thirteen subjects were asked to produce 3 s intervals continuously while performing a time sharing task. The time sharing task was designed to manipulate a demand to allocate an attentional resource to one target and a demand to switch the target to which an attentional resource was mainly allocated. Results showed that produc...

The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that two systems are involved in verbal working memory; one is specifically dedicated to the maintenance of phonological representations through verbal rehearsal while the other would maintain multimodal representations through attentional refreshing. This theoretical framework predicts that phonologically related phenomena such as the phonologica...

PURPOSE The purpose of the present experiment was to investigate whether the calf muscle fatigue affects postural sway in bipedal stance and requires additional attentional demands. METHODS Nine healthy university students had to respond as rapidly as possible to an unpredictable auditory stimulus while maintaining stable seated and upright postures with their eyes closed in two conditions of...

The anterior cingulate and lateral prefrontal cortices have been implicated in implementing context-appropriate attentional control, but the learning mechanisms underlying our ability to flexibly adapt the control settings to changing environments remain poorly understood. Here we show that human adjustments to varying control demands are captured by a reinforcement learner with a flexible, vol...

To clarify the relation between attention and microsaccades, we monitored microsaccades while observers performed tasks with different attentional demand. In four high-demand conditions, observers shifted attention covertly to a peripheral location, or focused attention at fixation. Three corresponding low-demand conditions on physically identical displays provided a basis for comparison. Our r...