Spider stimuli improve response inhibition

Anxiety can have positive effects on some aspects of cognition and negative effects on others. The current study investigated whether task-relevant anxiety could improve people’s ability to withhold responses in a response inhibition task. Sixty-seven university students completed a modified and an unmodified version of the Sustained Attention to Response Task (SART; Robertson, Manly, Andrade, Baddeley, & Yiend, 1997) and provided subjective measures of arousal and thoughts. Anxiety appeared to improve participants’ ability to withhold responses. Further, participants’ performance was consistent with a motor response inhibition perspective rather than a mind-wandering perspective of SART commission error performance. Errors of commission were associated with response times (speed-accuracy trade-off) as opposed to task-unrelated thoughts. Task-related thoughts were associated with the speed-accuracy trade-off. Conversely task-unrelated thoughts showed an association with errors of omission, suggesting this SART metric could be an indicator of sustained attention. Further investigation of the role of thoughts in the SART is warranted.     

A role of goals for social inhibition of return?

The social inhibition of return (sIOR) effect refers to the finding that response initiation times are longer if a movement is executed to a location where another person has responded to just before. Previous studies have examined the influence of the goal of the action on sIOR. In these studies, however, the movement endpoint and to-be-attained goal (e.g., touching/pressing a response key) were at the same spatial location. In the present two experiments, we disentangled movement endpoint and goal's identity and locations by means of introducing action effects that followed directly from a movement. Similar methods were previously shown powerful enough to clearly show the importance of action goals for other phenomena—a finding consistent with effect-based theories of action control, such as the ideomotor theory. The results of the present study revealed that sIOR was shaped by the movement endpoint location, not the goal's identity or location. That is, in both experiments, an sIOR effect was observed, but the magnitude of the sIOR effect was not modulated by repetitions/switches of goals or their locations. Thus, results indicate that goals play a negligible role in the emergence of the sIOR and, consequently, highlight the importance of action observation for the emergence of the sIOR effect.     

Age and gender differences in implicit motives

Research on age differences in implicit motives is rare and has shown contradictory results. We investigated age and gender differences in implicit motives (achievement, power, affiliation and intimacy), measured by the Picture Story Exercise (PSE), in an extensive, heterogeneous dyadic sample of 736 adults aged 20–80 years. Data were analyzed with a multilevel approach. Results indicate lower motive scores in all four measured motives in aged as compared to young adults but higher scores in activity inhibition. Further, women scored higher in affiliation and intimacy motives than men, while men scored higher in achievement and power motives and in activity inhibition than women. Possible underlying affective and neuroendocrinological processes of age dependent change in implicit motives are discussed.     

Conflict and metacognitive control: the mismatch-monitoring hypothesis of how others' knowledge states affect recall

Information about others' success in remembering is frequently available. For example, students taking an exam may assess its difficulty by monitoring when others turn in their exams. In two experiments, we investigated how rememberers use this information to guide recall. Participants studied paired associates, some semantically related (and thus easier to retrieve) and some unrelated (and thus harder). During a subsequent cued recall test, participants viewed fictive information about an opponent's accuracy on each item. In Experiment 1, participants responded to each cue once before seeing the opponent's performance and once afterwards. Participants reconsidered their responses least often when the opponent's accuracy matched the item difficulty (easy items the opponent recalled, hard items the opponent forgot) and most often when the opponent's accuracy and the item difficulty mismatched. When participants responded only after seeing the opponent's performance (Experiment 2), the same mismatch conditions that led to reconsideration even produced superior recall. These results suggest that rememberers monitor whether others' knowledge states accord or conflict with their own experience, and that this information shifts how they interrogate their memory and what they recall.     

Mental Set Shifting in Childhood: The Role of Working Memory and Inhibitory Control

The role of working memory (WM) and inhibition in mental set shifting was examined from an individual difference perspective in children aged 5–14 years (N = 117). Using the Hearts and Flowers task the rationale of the present study was to directly test the theoretical assumption that mental set shifiting in childhood primarily builds on WM and inhibitory processes. Theoretical predictions about WM and inhibitory demands in the congruent and incongruent conditions of the Hearts and Flowers task were also considered because these blocks underlie relevant measures of set shifting. The findings show that both WM and inhibition (extracted as factors in confirmatory factor analysis) are important for set shifting but that this general association is driven by the link between these executive functions (EFs) and the goal‐representation aspect (i.e. global switch costs) of shifting, rather than to the actual switch‐implementation process (i.e. local switch costs). In addition, our findings are novel in showing that, despite a substantial correlation between the two EF components, it was the variance specific to WM and inhibition that was important for mental set shifting. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Community Screening for Preschool Child Inhibition to Offer the ‘Cool Little Kids’ Anxiety Prevention Programme

Temperamental inhibition has been identified as a key risk factor for childhood anxiety and internalizing problems. An efficacious early prevention programme for shy/inhibited children has been developed; however, accurate, efficient and acceptable screening is needed to support wider implementation. We explore community screening options in the context of a trial implementing the Cool Little Kids prevention programme for anxiety disorders. In comparison to the Australian Temperament Project's inhibition scale, we examine the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire's (SDQ) ability to screen for inhibited preschool children. Parents of 6307 children aged 3 to 6 years enrolled in preschool programmes from eight socio‐economically diverse districts in Melbourne, Australia, first completed the measures of inhibition and SDQ. Parents with inhibited children then enrolled in the Cool Little Kids randomized trial (n = 545). Of these, 88% provided feedback about inhibition screening. Parents allocated to the intervention also provided feedback on the Cool Little Kids parenting programme. Results demonstrated that parents of preschool children (i) find inhibition screening acceptable, (ii) take up this parenting programme and (iii) report favourable feedback. The SDQ emotional symptoms subscale demonstrated acceptable sensitivity but insufficient specificity to identify inhibited preschool children. Presenting parents with a brief, validated inhibition scale could be a low‐cost option for identifying inhibited preschool children in the community to offer early anxiety prevention. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Need for closure and dealing with uncertainty in decision making context: The role of the behavioral inhibition system and working memory capacity

The aim of the present study was to investigate the moderated mediation model of the relationship between the behavioral inhibition system (BIS), need for closure (NFC) and working memory capacity (WMC) in the decision making process. It was assumed that NFC works as a motivational mechanism that enables individuals high in BIS to deal with uncertainty; therefore, NFC mediates the effect of BIS on behavior in a decision-making situation. Moreover, as uncertainty management requires cognitive resources, we expected WMC to moderate this relationship. In line with our hypothesis, we found that NFC mediated the relationship between BIS and the information search about the job candidates, and this effect occurred only for individuals high in WMC. We discuss these results in the context of effective self-regulation, as well as motivational and cognitive determinants of effort.     

The effects of categorical similarity and feature-space proximity on visual working memory processing

Two patterns of data predict that similarity has a positive effect and a negative effect on visual working memory (VWM) processing. We assume that these two empirical outcomes do not distinguish categorical similarity from feature-space proximity, resulting in this divergence. To investigate how categorical similarity and feature-space proximity modulate VWM, we tested memory for an array of pictures drawn from either mixed categories or a single category in which feature-space proximity varied along a morph continuum in a change-detection task. We found that memory under the mixed-category condition was better than that under the single-category condition, whereas memory under high feature-space proximity was superior to that under low feature-space proximity. These patterns were unaffected by manipulations of stimulus type (faces or scenes), encoding duration (limited or self-paced), and presentation format (simultaneous or sequential). These results are consistent with our hypotheses that categorical similarity inhibits VWM, whereas feature-space proximity facilitates VWM. We also found that memory for items with low feature-space proximity benefited more from mixed-category encoding than that for items with high feature-space proximity. Memory for faces benefited more from mixed-category encoding than scenes, whereas memory for scenes benefited more from feature-space proximity than faces. These results suggest that centre-surround inhibition organization might underlie similarity effects in VWM. Centre-surround inhibition organization for complex real-world objects could have both categorical level and feature-space level. The feature-space level might differ by category.     

颜色和形状工作记忆对非空间返回抑制效应的影响

为进一步考察非空间返回抑制效应是否受工作记忆内容的影响,分别采用颜色和形状工作记忆内容,通过两个实验考察了工作记忆对非空间返回抑制效应的影响。实验结果表明,在颜色和形状工作记忆条件下,均产生了颜色或形状返回抑制效应,并且颜色或形状返回抑制效应量之间均无显著差异,颜色和形状工作记忆内容只增加了判断靶刺激的反应时。研究结论对进一步认识工作记忆内容与非空间返回抑制效应之间的关系有重要参考价值。