Motor performance and concurrent cognitive tasks

Twenty students tapped between two targets while concurrently performing either a verbal or a visuospatial cognitive task. Speed of tapping and consistency revealed right- and left-hand disruption during solving either the con-current verbal or visuospatial task respectively. Accuracy of performance in terms of hitting the targets was not selectively disrupted by the cognitive activity. The results are discussed in terms of an attentional model of lateralization of cerebral function.     

Associations between evaluation anxiety,cognitive interference and performance on working memory tasks

According to Cognitive Interference Theory, evaluation anxiety leads to increased negative off‐task self‐dialogue which then results in diminished cognitive performance. Given that negative off‐task self‐dialogue is primarily verbal, the phonological loop and central executive components of the working memory system should be most affected by evaluation anxiety. Eighty‐eight participants were randomly assigned to receive evaluation anxiety inducing instructions or supportive instructions prior to administration of three tests (Digit Span, Visual Memory Span, and StroopColour‐Word) that measured the phonological loop, visuospatial sketchpad, and central executive components of working memory. Measures of evaluation anxiety and negative off‐task self‐dialogue were obtained during and after testing. Results showed that participants receiving anxiety inducing instructions reported significantly more evaluation anxiety and off‐task self‐dialogue. They also had significantly lower performance on the Digit Span Test and the StroopColour‐Word Test. Negative off‐task self‐dialogue also mediated the relationship between evaluation anxiety and performance on the Digit Span Test. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Secondary students' performance on Piagetian projective and Euclidean spatial tasks

Four tasks involving Piaget's Euclidean and projective space were administered to a total of 99 students in Grades 8, 10, and 12: Task 1, Volumes of Revolution; Task 2, Geometric Sections; Task 3, Folding Patterns; and Task 4, Projection of Shadows. A scalogram analysis indicated that the tasks scaled in increasing order of difficulty in the following order: Task 1, Task 4, Task 2, and Task 3. These results did not support Piaget's position that projective and Euclidean concepts develop concurrently. Also, significant differences between task performance with regard to gender were found for Tasks 3 and 4. Significant differences between task performance and grade level for Tasks 1 and 4 were found. Standardized achievement test performance and task performance relationships were significant in 3 of the 16 analyses.     

Attachment, attention, and cognitive control: Attachment style and performance on general attention tasks

Three studies examined the effects of attachment style on performance in non-attachment-related attention tasks; one study also assessed the effect of priming memories of experiences of attachment security or insecurity on attentional performance in a flanker task. In Study 1, participants performed a psychological refractory period (PRP) task assessing their ability to switch attention rapidly from one decision to another; in Studies 2 and 3 they performed a flanker task assessing their ability to resist distracters. Avoidant attachment predicted better performance on both tasks, and the effects remained even after controlling for neuroticism, general anxiety, and BIS/BAS scores. Study 3 showed that thinking in detail about a past experience of insecurity eliminated avoidant participants’ superior performance. In sum, avoidant people are generally skilled at regulating their attention, even on non-attachment-related tasks, but their performance is hampered by reminders of experiences of insecurity.     

Adolescents' expectancies of success,self-evaluations,and attributions about performance on spatial and verbal tasks

The present study examined the expectancies of success, evaluations of performance, and achievement-related attributions that high school students made about verbal and spatial tasks that typically show sex differences. Although no sex differences were found in task performance, boys expected to do better than girls on both the spatial and verbal tasks. After completing the task, the girls continued to evaluate their performance more negatively than did boys on the spatial tasks. On spatial tasks girls also attributed to themselves less ability and saw the tasks as being more difficult than did boys. The results suggest that there are generalized, rather than task-specific, sex differences in achievement expectancies, evaluations, and attributions. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for sex-related differences in cognitive functioning and subsequent achievement behaviors.The authors gratefully acknowledge support from the Judith Offer Fund and from the Spencer Foundation.     

Relationships between attentional blink magnitude, RSVP target accuracy, and performance on other cognitive tasks

When two masked, to-be-attended targets are presented within approximately half a second of each other, performance on the second target (T2) suffers, relative to when the targets are presented further apart in time or when the first target (T1) can be ignored. This pattern of results is known as the attentional blink (AB). Typically, participants differ with respect to the magnitude of their AB and their overall target accuracy. Despite investigations as to what participant characteristics may influence AB performance (e.g., age, brain damage, or mood state), there has been no focused examination of whether individual differences in cognitive performance measures predict the magnitude of the AB or overall rapid serial visual presentation(RSVP) target accuracy. Our university studentparticipants performed single-target and dual-target RSVP tasks, as well as a selection of cognitive tasks that did not use RSVP presentations, with color, letter, digit, and object stimuli. Overall performance on each of the RSVP targets (T1, T2, and single target) was predicted by speeded manual and vocal identification times to isolated stimuli and by performance with other RSVP targets. However, the magnitude of the AB was predicted only by T1 accuracy, not by any other performance measures. The results suggest that individual differences in AB magnitude do not result from differences in effective RSVP target encoding and are not well explained by varied information-processing abilities.     

Motor expertise and performance in spatial tasks: A meta-analysis

The present study aimed to provide a summary of findings relevant to the influence of motor expertise on performance in spatial tasks and to examine potential moderators of this effect. Studies of relevance were those in which individuals involved in activities presumed to require motor expertise were compared to non-experts in such activities. A final set of 62 effect sizes from 33 samples was included in a multilevel meta-analysis. The results showed an overall advantage in favor of motor experts in spatial tasks (d = 0.38). However, the magnitude of that effect was moderated by expert type (athlete, open skills/ball sports, runner/cyclist, gymnast/dancers, musicians), stimulus type (2D, blocks, bodies, others), test category (mental rotation, spatial perception, spatial visualization), specific test (Mental Rotations Test, generic mental rotation, disembedding, rod-and-frame test, other), and publication status. These findings are discussed in the context of embodied cognition and the potential role of activities requiring motor expertise in promoting good spatial performance.     

Lesions of the rat postsubiculum impair performance on spatial tasks.

Previous studies have identified a population of neurons in the postsubiculum that discharge as a function of the rat's head direction in the horizontal plane (Taube, Muller, & Ranck, 1990a). To assess the contribution of these cells in spatial learning, Long-Evans rats were tested in a variety of spatial and nonspatial tasks following bilateral electrolytic or neurotoxic lesions of the postsubiculum. Compared to unlesioned control animals, lesioned animals were impaired on two spatial tasks, a radial eight-arm maze task and a Morris water task, although the performance scores of both lesion groups improved over the course of behavioral testing. In contrast, lesioned animals were unimpaired on two nonspatial tasks, a cued version of the water maze task and a conditioned taste-aversion paradigm. In addition, lesioned animals showed transient hyperactivity in an open-field activity test. These results support the concept that neurons in the postsubiculum are part of a neural network involved in the processing of spatial information.     

An exploratory study of cognitive style in performance on matched and mismatched tasks

Researchers have suggested that task performance is often dependent upon the congruence of cognitive style and task. To explore this suggestion, 44 female and 4 male undergraduates were administered the Cognitive Style Analysis, the Closure Flexibility, the Composite Gestalt Completion Test, and the Vocabulary subtest from the WAIS. Specifically, four hypotheses were tested: (1) that participants with an analytic style will perform better than those with a wholistic style on the Closure Flexibility; (2) that participants with a wholistic style will perform better than those with an analytic style on the Composite Gestalt Completion Test; (3) that participants with an intermediate style will outperform persons with an analytic style on the Composite Gestalt Completion Test; and (4) that intermediate scorers would perform better than those with a wholistic style on Closure Flexibility. Only the second hypothesis was supported, so results provide only minimal support for the effect of match or mismatch of cognitive style and task performance.     

The influence of cognitive load on spatial search performance

During search, executive function enables individuals to direct attention to potential targets, remember locations visited, and inhibit distracting information. In the present study, we investigated these executive processes in large-scale search. In our tasks, participants searched a room containing an array of illuminated locations embedded in the floor. The participants’ task was to press the switches at the illuminated locations on the floor so as to locate a target that changed color when pressed. The perceptual salience of the search locations was manipulated by having some locations flashing and some static. Participants were more likely to search at flashing locations, even when they were explicitly informed that the target was equally likely to be at any location. In large-scale search, attention was captured by the perceptual salience of the flashing lights, leading to a bias to explore these targets. Despite this failure of inhibition, participants were able to restrict returns to previously visited locations, a measure of spatial memory performance. Participants were more able to inhibit exploration to flashing locations when they were not required to remember which locations had previously been visited. A concurrent digit-span memory task further disrupted inhibition during search, as did a concurrent auditory attention task. These experiments extend a load theory of attention to large-scale search, which relies on egocentric representations of space. High cognitive load on working memory leads to increased distractor interference, providing evidence for distinct roles for the executive subprocesses of memory and inhibition during large-scale search.     

Musculoskeletal pain complaints and performance on cognitive tasks over the adult life span

The present study aimed at comparing participants with and without self reported musculoskeletal pain in a normal population with regard to performance on a range of tests for episodic memory, semantic memory, and other cognitive functions and to see if expected differences interacted with age. The results showed that participants with pain performed worse on a range of tasks as compared to participants without pain, and that these differences occurred regardless of age. The most robust effects of pain were displayed on tests for vocabulary and construction ability as these were the only effects that remained significant after controlling for years of education and reported depression in separate analyses. When depression and education were controlled for in the same analysis, even these effects were eliminated, suggesting interplay between pain, depressive status, and educational level in the negative effects on cognitive functioning.     

Socially triggered negative affect impairs performance in simple cognitive tasks

The aim of this research was to investigate the influence of a social-evaluative context on simple cognitive tasks. While another person present in the room evaluated photographs of beautiful women or landscapes by beauty/attractiveness, female participants had to perform a combination of digit-categorization and spatial-compatibility task. There, before every trial, one of the women or landscape pictures was presented. Results showed selective performance impairments: the numerical distance effects increased on trials that followed women pictures but only, if another person concurrently evaluated these women pictures. In a second experiment, using the affective priming paradigm, the authors show that female pictures have a more negative connotation when they are concurrently evaluated by another person (social-evaluative context) than when they are not evaluated (neutral context). Together, these results suggest that the social-evaluative context triggers mild negative affective reactions to women pictures which then impair performance in an unrelated task.     

Differentiation of fluid, visual, and simultaneous cognitive tasks

The constructs of fluid reasoning and spatial visualization (Horn, 1989) as well as the construct of simultaneous processing (Luria, 1966) have been tapped by various cognitive assessment batteries. In order to determine whether these constructs could be differentiated from one another, factor analyses of subtest scores from six cognitive tasks were conducted. Fluid reasoning, spatial visualization, and simultaneous processing emerged as separate factors in the analysis, supporting the hypothesis that these constructs can be differentiated in psychoeducational testing. These results extend the findings of a preliminary study which found factorial differentiation between fluid and simultaneous reasoning.     

The effects of an appraisal manipulation: Affect,intrusive cognitions,and performance for two cognitive tasks

We examined the relationship between trait measures of general appraisal and test anxiety, state measures of stress appraisals, affect, and intrusive cognition, and performance measures on two cognitive tests (mental math and Raven matrices). Participants were randomly assigned to threat, challenge, or control conditions that were created by manipulating both primary and secondary appraisals. We predicted that the threat condition would lead to more negative affect, stress appraisals, intrusive cognitions, and more errors. While our manipulated conditions led to inconsistent effects, path analyses tended to confirm predictions that negative task appraisals and trait test anxiety lead to negative affect and to intrusive cognitions, and that for mental math test performance a path from intrusive cognitions to test errors was established. The importance of understanding dispositionaland situational variables and their interactions during stress encounters are discussed, as is future research involving the general appraisal dimension. The authors wish to thank the many students who acted as experimenters and helped with data entry. Thanks go to James Johnson, Ann Schuller, and Brandon Vancura for all their hard work. Special thanks go to Roger Lott for his expert performance as the main investigator in the threat and challenge conditions. An enormous debt of gratitude also goes to my wife Kathy for all her patience and support, and for her help with the audio tapes used in this study. This study was completed as partial fulfillment of the requirements for a Master’s Degree for the first author. Portions of this work will be presented at the annual meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, 1997.     

Language, space, and the development of cognitive flexibility in humans: the case of two spatial memory tasks

Prior experiments have shown that young children, like adult rats, rely mainly on information about the macroscopic shape of the environment to reorient themselves, whereas human adults rely more flexibly on combinations of spatial and non-spatial landmark information. Adult rats have also been shown to exhibit a striking limitation in another spatial memory task, movable object search, again a limitation not shown by human adults. The present experiments explored the developmental change in humans leading to more flexible, human adult-like performance on these two tasks. Experiment 1 identified the age range of 5-7 years as the time the developmental change for reorientation occurs. Experiment 2 employed a multiple regression approach to determine that among several candidate measures, only a specific language production measure, the production of phrases specifying exactly the information needed to solve the task like adults, correlated with the reorientation performance of children in this age range. Experiment 3 revealed that similar language production abilities were associated with more flexible moving object search task performance. These results, in combination with findings with human adults, suggest that language production skills play a causal role in allowing older humans to construct novel representations rapidly, which can then be used to transcend the limits of phylogenetically older cognitive processes.     

Effects of active and passive EMG biofeedback training on performance of motor and cognitive tasks.

The goal of this study was to compare the effects of general relaxation (passive group) and neuromuscular tension control (active group), both using EMG biofeedback techniques, on the performance of memorization, simple reaction time, and rotary pursuit. 18 subjects were given five consecutive daily sessions of training or were placed under control conditions, after which their performance on these various tasks was evaluated. Results indicate that control of neuromuscular tension seemed to facilitate performance on all tasks over that of the control group. Except for simple reaction time, there was no difference between the "active" and "passive" groups. The results are interpreted in terms of factors in selection of subjects and experimental conditions.