A shield against distraction

In this paper, we apply the basic idea of a trade-off between the level of concentration and distractibility to test whether a manipulation of task difficulty can shield against distraction. Participants read, either in quiet or with a speech noise background, texts that were displayed either in an easy-to-read or a hard-to-read font. Background speech impaired prose recall, but only when the text was displayed in the easy-to-read font. Most importantly, recall was better in the background speech condition for hard-to-read than for easy-to-read texts. Moreover, individual differences in working memory capacity were related to the magnitude of disruption, but only in the easy-to-read condition. Making a task more difficult can sometimes facilitate selective attention in noisy work environments by promoting focal-task engagement.     

Challenging tasks: The role of employees' and supervisors' goal orientations

Research shows that challenging jobs stimulate employee learning and retention. Nevertheless, empirical knowledge on what influences the amount of challenging tasks employees perform in their job is lacking. In this study, we examined the extent to which the performance of challenging tasks is related to employees' and supervisors' goal orientations. We found a positive relationship between employees' mastery-approach orientation and the performance of challenging tasks. Furthermore, if supervisors had authority over the tasks of their employees, supervisors' goal orientations were related to employees' task challenge. Performing challenging tasks was negatively related to supervisors' performance-approach orientation and positively related to supervisors' performance-avoidance orientation.     

Expanding the link between core self-evaluations and affective job attitudes

The present study examined the differentiated relationship between core self-evaluations and affective job attitudes. In previous research, job characteristics were proposed to mediate this relationship. However, the facets of the job characteristics model have not yet been assessed separately. In the present study we tested which job characteristics (i.e., skill variety, task identity, task significance, autonomy, and feedback) mediate the relationship between core self-evaluations and job satisfaction as well as organizational commitment in a sample of 199 employees. Results revealed that core self-evaluations were related to job satisfaction and organizational commitment. Task significance was found to mediate these relationships. These findings are discussed with respect to the level on which people regulate their actions.     

The Job Demands and Resources Decision Making (JD-R-DM) Model

This study explores the effects of nurses’ daily job characteristics (i.e., job demands and resources) and general work engagement on their daily decision making (i.e., analytical and intuitive) and consequently their daily performance (i.e., task and contextual). Participants completed a baseline questionnaire and a diary for five consecutive days. Results reveal a positive influence of the job demands “work pressure” and “predictability” on analytical decision making. In turn, analytical decision making promotes task performance. Work pressure also negatively influences intuitive decision making which, in turn, stimulates task and contextual performance. However, the job resource (i.e., autonomy) had a nonsignificant relationship with decision making. General work engagement had positive effects on analytical decision making and moderated the relationship between intuitive decision making and contextual performance. For those high on work engagement, the relation was stronger compared to their counterparts low on work engagement. Results corroborate that expanding and testing decision-making theories can increase understanding on how the work environment and engagement influence employee decision making and performance.     

The influence of task characteristics on younger and older adult motor overflow

This study investigated the influence of attentional and motor demands on motor overflow in 17 healthy young (18–35 years) and 17 older adults (60–80 years). Participants performed a finger pressing task by exerting either 33% or 66% of their maximal force output using their dominant or nondominant hand. Overflow was concurrently recorded in the passive hand. Attention was manipulated via a tactile stimulus presented to one or both hands for certain trials. Results showed that older adults exhibited greater overflow than young adults and that the effect of target force was exacerbated in older adults. Further, only older adult overflow was increased when tactile stimulation was directed to one or both hands. Increased overflow in older adults may result from bilateral cortical activation that is influenced by increased task demands. To perform comparatively to younger adults, older adults may compensate for age-related brain changes by recruiting an increased cortical network.     

Exploring the forgetting mechanisms in working memory: Evidence from a reasoning span test

In working memory (WM) span tests participants have to maintain to-be-remembered information while processing other, potentially distracting, information. Previous studies have shown that WM span scores are greater when span lists start with a long processing task and end with a short processing task than when these processing tasks are presented in the reverse order (e.g., Towse, Hitch, & Hutton, 2000). In Experiment 1, we obtained a similar stimulus order effect in a reasoning span test, using reasoning sentences that were equated for length in terms of the number of constituent words, but which differed in processing complexity; span scores were greater when lists began with a complex sentence and ended with a simple sentence than when this stimulus order was reversed. In Experiment 2, the stimulus order effect was not found when processing duration was held constant while sentence complexity was varied using a computer-paced moving window presentation paradigm. These results suggest that duration-based constraints can affect degree of forgetting independently of the load generated during processing phases in WM span performance and therefore imply that time-related forgetting can occur in WM span tests, particularly when the difficulty of the processing component blocks active maintenance of to-be-remembered material.     

Processing of representations in declarative and procedural working memory

The article investigates the relation between declarative and procedural working memory (WM; Oberauer, 2009). Two experiments test the assumption that representations in the two subsystems are selected for processing in analogous ways. Participants carried out a series of decisions on memorized lists of digits. For each decision, they had to select declarative and procedural representations. Regarding declarative representations, participants selected a memory set and a digit within this set as the input to each decision. With respect to the procedural representations, they selected a task set to be applied to the selected digit and a response within that task set. We independently manipulated the number of lists and the number of tasks to be switched among (one, two, or three; Experiment 1) and preparation time for a list switch (Experiment 2). For three effects commonly observed in task-switch studies, analogues in declarative WM were found: list-switch costs, mixing costs, and residual switch costs. List- and task-switch costs were underadditive, suggesting that declarative and procedural representations are selected separately and in parallel. The findings support the hypothesis of two analogous WM subsystems.     

Your words are my words: Effects of acting together on encoding

Social influences on action and memory are well established. However, it is unknown how acting together affects the incidental encoding of information. The present study asked whether coactors encode information that is relevant to a partner's task, but irrelevant to their own task. In Experiment 1, participants performed a categorization task alone and together, followed by a surprise free recall test where they were asked to recall items from the categorization task. Recall was better not only for items that participants had responded to themselves, but also for items that their coactor had responded to, than for items that had not required a response. The same results were found in Experiment 2, even though financial incentives motivated participants to only encode words they had responded to themselves. Together, the findings suggest that performing tasks together can modulate how information relevant to coactors is processed. Shared task representations may act as a vehicle for establishing shared memories.     

The shielding function of task rules in the context of task switching

There is increasing evidence that task rules help shield the response against distractor interference. Here, the authors investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this assumed shielding function of task rules and how it is adjusted to changing task demands. In two experiments, participants switched between a noun categorization and an adjective categorization task. Target words were superimposed on distractor pictures. These pictures were always irrelevant and depicted either objects also used as target words in the noun task (noun distractors) or objects that were not part of the noun target-set but could be categorized according to the noun task (noun-related distractors). Results show that (a) on task repetitions shielding prevents interference from any distractors associated with a competing task; this is indicated by the lack of interference on adjective task repetitions; and (b) shielding is reduced on task switches. In the noun task, this reduction resulted in attenuated interference by noun-related distractors. In the adjective task, spatial distractors did not interfere despite the reduction. This result suggests that shielding is supported by a processing advantage for task-related information and not by distractor suppression.     

Task difficulty and response complexity modulate affective priming by emotional facial expressions

In this study we used an affective priming task to address the issue of whether the processing of emotional facial expressions occurs automatically independent of attention or attentional resources. Participants had to attend to the emotion expression of the prime face, or to a nonemotional feature of the prime face, the glasses. When participants attended to glasses (emotion unattended), they had to report whether the face wore glasses or not (the glasses easy condition) or whether the glasses were rounded or squared (the shape difficult condition). Affective priming, measured on valence decisions on target words, was mainly defined as interference from incongruent rather than facilitation from congruent trials. Significant priming effects were observed just in the emotion and glasses tasks but not in the shape task. When the key–response mapping increased in complexity, taxing working memory load, affective priming effects were reduced equally for the three types of tasks. Thus, attentional load and working memory load affected additively to the observed reduction in affective priming. These results cast some doubts on the automaticity of processing emotional facial expressions.