Agentic extraversion moderates the effect of physical exercise on executive shifting performance

The present study investigated the impact of physical exercise on the executive shifting function in 24 participants low and 24 participants high in agentic extraversion and tested whether agentic extraversion moderated the exercise effect. Participants accomplished a shifting task and a control task that employed the same materials and response procedure as the shifting task but required less central-executive processing. Physical exercise was varied within subjects. The order of conditions was counterbalanced. After resting, the high agentic extraversion group showed higher cognitive flexibility than the low agentic extraversion group, whereas only the low agentic extraversion group improved after exercise. The results showed that agentic extraversion moderated the exercise effect on shifting performance. Implications concerning the hypothetical dopaminergic mediation were discussed.     

Staying and Returning dynamics of young children's attention

In this paper, we decompose selective sustained attending behavior into components of continuous attention maintenance and attentional transitions and study how each of these components develops in young children. Our results in two experiments suggest that changes in children's ability to return attention to a target locus after distraction (“Returning”) play a crucial role in the development of selective sustained attention between the ages of 3.5–6 years, perhaps to a greater extent than changes in the ability to continuously maintain attention on the target (“Staying”). We further distinguish Returning from the behavior of transitioning attention away from task (i.e., becoming distracted) and investigate the relative contributions of bottom-up and top-down factors on these different types of attentional transitions. Overall, these results (a) suggest the importance of understanding the cognitive process of transitioning attention for understanding selective sustained attention and its development, (b) provide an empirical paradigm within which to study this process, and (c) begin to characterize basic features of this process, namely its development and its relative dependence on top-down and bottom-up influences on attention.

Research Highlights

• Young children exhibited an endogenously ability, Returning, to preferentially transition attention to task-relevant information over task-irrelevant information.
• Selective sustained attention and its development were decomposed into Returning and Staying, or task-selective attention maintenance, using novel eye-tracking-based measures.
• Returning improved between the ages of 3.5–6 years, to a greater extent than Staying.
• Improvements in Returning supported improvements in selective sustained attention between these ages.

     

Near-hand effects are robust: Three OSF pre-registered replications of visual biases in perihand space

ABSTRACT

Although previous work provides evidence that observers experience biases in visual processing when they view stimuli in perihand space, a few recent investigations have questioned the reliability of these near-hand effects. We addressed this controversy by running three pre-registered replication experiments. Experiment 1 was a replication of one of the initial studies on facilitated target detection near the hands in which participants performed an attentional cueing task while placing a single hand either near or far from the display. Experiment 2 tested the same paradigm while adopting the design of a recent experiment that called into question near-hand facilitation. Experiment 3 was a replication of a study in which hand proximity influenced working memory performance in a change detection paradigm. Across all three experiments, we found significant interactions between hand position and stimulus characteristics that indicated the hands’ presence altered visual processing, bolstering evidence favouring the robustness of near-hand effects.     

Executive functions in early childhood: The role of maternal and paternal parenting practices

We investigated the association between mothers' and fathers' harsh parenting and sensitive parenting practices and child's executive functions (EF) in early childhood in 607 families. We focused on three broad dimensions of child EF: Emergent metacognition, inhibitory self‐control, and flexibility measured with the parent‐reported Behavior Rating Inventory of Executive Function‐Preschool Version. Less sensitive parenting of the mother and harsher parenting of the father were related to lower scores of emergent metacognition and inhibitory self‐control. Parenting was not associated with child flexibility. This study extends previous research on the association between parenting and EF by the focus on the role of the father and demonstrates independent effects of mother and father on child EF.