Vivek Naranbhai1,2, Quarraisha Abdool Karim1,3, Kogieleum Naidoo1, Nonhlanhla YendeZuma1, and Salim S Abdool Karim1,3 1CAPRISA – Centre for the AIDS Programme of Research in South Africa, Doris Duke Medical Research Institute, Nelson R Mandela School of Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa 2Wellcome Trust Centre for Human Genetics, Nuffield Department of Medicine, Univers...

This paper looks at the problem of valence shifting, rewriting a text to preserve much of its meaning but alter its sentiment characteristics. There has only been a small amount of previous work on the task, which appears to be more difficult than researchers anticipated, not least in agreement between human judges regarding whether a text had indeed had its valence shifted in the intended dire...

In two experiments, we compared secondary task interference on Tower of London performance resulting from three different secondary tasks. The secondary tasks were designed to tap three different executive functions, namely set-shifting, memory monitoring and updating, and response inhibition. Previous work using individual differences methodology suggests that, all other things being equal, th...

A constant task for every living organism is to decide whether to exploit rewards associated with current behavior or to explore the environment for more rewarding options. Current empirical evidence indicates that exploitation is related to phasic whereas exploration is related to tonic firing mode of noradrenergic neurons in the locus coeruleus. In humans, this exploration-exploitation trade-...

Switching between mental sets has been extensively investigated in both experimental and individual differences research using a wide range of task-switch paradigms. However, it is yet unclear whether these different tasks measure a unitary shifting ability or reflect different facets thereof. In this study, 20 task pairs were administered to 119 young adults to assess 5 proposed components of ...