this study investigated the impact of sequencing tasks from simple to complex along +/- reasoning demands on the fluency of writing task performance among efl learners. the participants of the study were 90 inter- mediate efl learners from three classes at islamic azad university, shahr-e-qods branch in iran. they were distributed in three groups: experimental a, experimental b, and a control g...

The dual task is a data-rich paradigm for evaluating speech modes of a synthetic talking head. Three experiments manipulated auditory–visual (AV) and auditory-only (A-only) speech produced by text-to-speech synthesis from a talking head (Experiment 1—single task; Experiment 2—dual task), and natural speech produced by a human male similar in appearance to the talking head (Experiment 3—dual tas...

Transcranial magnetic stimulation and neuroimaging data have revealed bilateral posterior parietal cortex (PPC) involvement during verbal n-back working memory (WM). In this task as n (i.e., WM load) increases, subjects show poorer behavioral performance as well as greater activation of this brain area. Moreover, there is evidence that a brief period of practice or even increased familiarity wi...

This research showed that appropriate input and suitable contexts for interaction among students can lead to successful  second language acquisition (SLA). This study based on Swain's (2005) notion of collaborative dialogue, aimed to study whether EFL learners participating in negotiation of meaning based tasks collaborate with each other and, if so, to investigate the role of this behavior in ...

The corpus callosum has been proposed to contribute to attention by modulating resource allocation between the hemispheres and filtering interhemispheric signal transmission (M. T. Banich, 1998). The resource allocation hypothesis predicts that interhemispheric interactions become more advantageous with increasing resource demands. The selective filtering hypothesis predicts that interhemispher...

Lavie (1995) proposed a load account of selective attention, which holds that spare capacity is involuntarily allocated to the processing of irrelevant stimuli. In support of this account, Lavie and Cox (1997) combined a letter search task with a flanker task and found that increasing load (search set size) resulted in decreased interference from an irrelevant distractor letter. In three experi...

Initially described as task-induced deactivations during goal-directed paradigms of high attentional load, the unresolved functionality of default mode regions has long been assumed to interfere with task performance. However, recent evidence suggests a potential default mode network involvement in fulfilling cognitive demands. We tested this hypothesis in a finger opposition paradigm with task...