This study was designed to assess the impact of social support on poststressor cognitive impairment, with the goal of providing a laboratory test of the buffering hypothesis of social support. High or low support was operationahzed as the warm or the neutral behavior of an interviewer, which preceded the experimental stressor, high or low task load Subjects were 32 nonpsychotic female psychiatr...

For self-regulated learning to be effective, students need to be able to accurately monitor their performance while they are working on a task, use this as input for self-assessment of that performance after the task, and select an appropriate new learning task in response to that assessment. From a cognitive load perspective, monitoring can be seen as a secondary task that may become hard to m...

L2 vocabulary acquisition is of much importance to learners and has long been the hot topic in field applied linguistics. Stimulated by Technical Feature Analysis (TFA) Involvement Load Hypothesis (ILH) particular, a large body research attempted find relative efficacy various tasks facilitating acquisition. However, there paucity regarding effectiveness ILH TFA accounting for task type effects...

The perceptual load theory of attention proposes that the degree to which visual distractors are processed is a function of the attentional demands of a task-greater demands increase filtering of irrelevant distractors. The spatial configuration of such filtering is unknown. Here, we used steady-state visual evoked potentials (SSVEPs) in conjunction with time-domain event-related potentials (ER...

In this thesis I exam ined the effects of task switching on people’s ability to ignore irrelevant distractors. Load theory proposes that distractor interference critically depends on the availability of executive control to minimise the effects of irrelevant stimuli (e.g. Lavie, 2000). Much work on task switching suggests that task switching demands executive control in order to prepare for and...

The default mode of brain function hypothesis and the presence of spontaneous intrinsic low-frequency signal fluctuations during rest have recently attracted attention in the neuroscience community. In this study we asked two questions: First, is it possible to attenuate intrinsic activity in the self-referential, default mode of brain function by directing the brains resources to a goal-orient...

The claim that face perception is mediated by a specialized ‘face module’ that proceeds automatically, independently of attention (e.g., Kanwisher, 2000) can be reconciled with load theory claims that visual perception has limited capacity (e.g., Lavie, 1995) by hypothesizing that face perception has face-specific capacity limits. We tested this hypothesis by comparing the effects of face and n...

The inhibitory deficit hypothesis of cognitive aging posits that older adults' inability to adequately suppress processing of irrelevant information is a major source of cognitive decline. Prior research has demonstrated that in response to task-irrelevant auditory stimuli there is an age-associated increase in the amplitude of the N1 wave, an ERP marker of early perceptual processing. Here, we...