Rapid-response versus free-time selection tasks using different logical connectives

When reasoning with conditional statements (i.e., if [not] p then [not] q), people tend to display matching bias: Options that match the entities named in the rule are selected even when logically inappropriate. Three different Wason selection tasks were administered under free-time and rapid-response formats. For the latter, individual cards were presented for one second, and required a response within a further one second. Previous research using these formats (Roberts & Newton, 2001) has shown that this increases matching bias, in line with the action of preconscious heuristic processes which direct attention towards relevant aspects of a problem, but whose action can be overturned if there is sufficient time to apply analytic reasoning processes. The selection tasks administered included a standard abstract conditional task, a disjunctive version (i.e., either [not] p or [not] q), and a conditional task in which the cards showed explicitly negated values. Both conditional tasks demonstrated matching bias, but under rapid-response presentation, matching bias only increased for the standard conditional and disjunctive tasks. Overall, the data support Evans’ (e.g., 2006) heuristic-analytic framework albeit with some caveats, and it is suggested that the broad question, of whether individual selection task formats show or do not show matching bias, requires more detailed investigation.     

Practice-related reduction of dual-task costs under conditions of a manual-pedal response combination

Severe dual-task costs emerge when two tasks are performed at the same time. Schumacher, Seymour, Glass, Kieras, and Meyer (2001) showed a complete reduction of dual-task costs after extensive dual-task practice with a visual-manual (VM) task and an auditory-verbal (AV) task. First, we replicated these findings and found task conditions sufficient to achieve a high level of dual-task cost reduction (Experiment 1). Using these conditions, we tested whether the Schumacher et al. findings generalise to a different dual-task situation, in which participants practised a VM task and an auditory-pedal (AP) task (VM-AP) conjointly (Experiment 2). In the VM-AP task situation we found reduced dual-task costs after practice. Dual-task costs, however, remained on a high level after eight sessions of practice and also when extending practice to 12 sessions. No single participant showed evidence for time sharing in the VM-AP dual task. These results suggest that the finding of complete dual-task cost reduction does not generalise to the VM-AP task combination used in the present study. We discuss different factors potentially relevant for the observation of persisting dual-task costs over practice in the VM-AP task.     

The need for central resources in answering questions in different domains: Folk psychology,biology, and economics

This study examined whether, when lay people reason about everyday domains, they do so in a slow, serial, deliberate process or using an automatic, effortless, associative process, and whether there are differences in this respect between content domains. The cognitive resources used by lay persons in reasoning about everyday domains were investigated using a dual task methodology. Fifty-eight adult participants answered computer-administered questions on folk biology (ToB), folk economics (ToE), and folk psychology, where the latter included questions requiring participants to infer an emotion from a verbally presented situation (ToP) and false-belief tasks (ToM). Each domain was tested with questionnaires at two levels of difficulty. Half the participants concurrently performed the 2-back task. Cognitive load reduced accuracy on the main task for ToM tasks (especially for second-order false-belief items) but not for the other domains. Performing the main tasks reduces accuracy and increases latencies on the secondary task for all domains. These findings suggest that the appropriate generalisation does not relate to content domains (such as folk psychology vs. folk biology), but rather to the nature of the task under consideration. For ToE, ToB, and ToP, the relevant inference questions appear to be processed mainly by the associative systems in LTM, and the process is not affected by a concurrent secondary task. For ToM, the response generation processing occurs in the analytic subsystem, and is therefore affected by cognitive load. Further, the more difficult set of questions impaired the secondary task more than the simpler set, in every domain and in terms of both accuracy and latency. This suggests that the processing involved in the associative system consumes domain-general resources too.     

代数应用题项目生成中的认知过程与任务特征分析

认知项目设计起源于理论驱动的测量模式,要求在详尽阐述测量建构理论的基础上,鉴别测验项目类型的任务特征,建立和标定与测量建构认知变量之间的对应关系,从而通过系统变换任务特征生成项目.本文以Greeno (1994)提出的代理者-情境交互作用(agent-situation interaction)的问题解决观为基础,对代数应用题解决的认知过程和任务蕴含性(affordance)进行了系统分析.具体而言,代数应用题被视为以文本形式呈现的,嵌套在现实情境中的某种量化结构.在代数应用题解决的转译、整合、计划、执行的认知过程中需要形成三种不同的表征,即文本基、情境模型和问题模型.其形成及解决过程受到个体问题图式知识的深刻影响.对应于不同表征方式,对代数应用题语法/语义结构、量化元素及结构、问题情境特征进行了系统分析和综合.该分析表明,为了保证代数应用题项目生成的科学性,当前研究的关键在于建立任务特征与问题解决认知变量之间的经验关系,并在问题领域整体水平上检验这种关系的可推广性.     

Impaired context maintenance in mild to moderately depressed students

We test the hypothesis that people with depression experience difficulties in maintaining task-relevant context information over longer periods of time using the AX version of the continuous performance task (AX-CPT). The AX-CPT requires that participants maintain a context cue (A) in an active state in order to respond correctly to a target cue (X) presented after a short delay. A total of 40 nondepressed and mild to moderately depressed students completed versions of the task with short (1-s) or long (10-s) interstimulus intervals (ISIs). Mildly depressed participants made significantly more context-dependent (BX) errors, unlike controls who made more errors on trials where good context processing would impair performance (AY). This pattern of errors was only evident in the long ISI condition, suggesting poor maintenance of contextual information.     

Transfer of response codes from choice-response to go/no-go tasks

The present study investigated the conditions for observing the Simon effect in go/no-go tasks. The Simon effect denotes faster and more accurate responses when irrelevant stimulus location and response location correspond than when they do not correspond. In four experiments, participants performed both in a choice-response task (CRT) and in a go/no-go task, and we varied the order and the similarity of the tasks. In the CRT, participants pressed a left key to one stimulus colour and a right key to another stimulus colour; in the go/no-go task, participants pressed one (e.g., left) key to one stimulus colour and refrained from responding to the other stimulus colour. As expected, Simon effects were consistently observed in the CRT. In contrast, Simon effects in the go/no-go task were only observed when it followed the CRT and when the mapping of stimulus colours to response locations was preserved between tasks (i.e., in Experiment 4). Results suggest that transfer of a particular S–R rule including response location from the CRT to the go/no-go task was responsible for the Simon effect in the latter task. In general, results are consistent with a response-discrimination account of the Simon effect.     

Sex differences in the processing of flankers

The study of sex differences in cognition has often focused on differences in spatial processing. Recently, sex differences in selective attention have been observed by Bayliss, di Pellegrino, and Tipper (2005), showing that women are more influenced than men by irrelevant spatial cues. The current study elaborates on this finding and tests whether sex differences in the processing of irrelevant information also occur in a simpler task, in which there is no need to redirect visual attention and no need to remember multiple spatial stimulus–response associations. Here, attention is studied using a novel combination of a go/no-go task and a flanker task. A total of 80 neurotypical participants were studied, and it was found that responses in women were more strongly affected by flanker information than were responses in men. This suggests that these sex differences were not due to difficulties with spatial reorientation, or remembering spatial stimulus–response relationships. The findings are discussed in the context of the hunter–gatherer theory of sex differences.     

Cognitive control in cued task switching with transition cues: Cue processing,task processing,and cue–task transition congruency

We investigated the processes underlying performance during cued task switching with transition cues. To this end, transition cueing and explicit cueing were compared in a design controlling for sequential effects in the two preceding trials in order to further examine the contribution of cue processes, task processes, and cue–task transition congruency during transition cueing. The study confirmed that the task-switch cost in transition cueing is larger than the task-switch cost in explicit cueing and showed that this larger switch cost is mainly due to cue processing. We also successfully decomposed performance in transition cueing into cue processing, task processing, and cue–task transition congruency on both a theoretical (Experiment 1) and an empirical basis (Experiments 2–3). Our empirical dissociation also demonstrates that cue–task transition congruency affects performance during both cue processing and task processing. We discuss the importance of our findings in relation to the different theories on task switching.     

Interpersonal self‐support and attentional bias on negative and positive interpersonal information

Interpersonal self‐support is an indigenous Chinese personality concept. It represents the idealized notion of the kind of personality traits that help individuals deal with interpersonal problems and develop and maintain the harmonic and appropriate social relationships required in China's collectivistic and interdependent culture. It also was assumed to be a protective personality factor with regard to mental health and was found to be negatively related to psychosomatic symptoms. In the current study, cognitive processing of interpersonal information is assumed to be an underlying mechanism that connects interpersonal self‐support with interpersonal relationships and mental health. To test this hypothesis, we conducted two experiments to investigate whether attentional bias on positive and negative interpersonal information was related to high and low interpersonal self‐support. A spatial cueing task and the emotional Stroop task were administered to two samples of high and low interpersonal self‐support Chinese undergraduate students to measure attentional bias. The results from both experiments suggested that high interpersonal self‐support students had an attentional bias toward positive interpersonal information, while low interpersonal self‐support students preferentially attended to negative interpersonal information. Study 1 indicated that attentional bias toward positive interpersonal information was easily engaged in the high interpersonal self‐support group, while attentional bias toward negative interpersonal information was both easy to engage and difficult to disengage in the low interpersonal self‐support students. These results support our hypotheses that high interpersonal self‐support people engage in positive processing of interpersonal information, whereas low interpersonal self‐support people engage in negative processing of interpersonal information. The differential balance between positive and negative processing on interpersonal information may explain why interpersonal self‐support predicts both mental health and interpersonal relationships. In addition, the relational schema may explain why interpersonal self‐support is associated with an attentional bias toward interpersonal information.     

Working Memory in Children Predicts Performance on a Gambling Task

ABSTRACT. The authors investigated whether working memory (WM) plays a significant role in the development of decision making in children, operationalized by the Children's Gambling Task (CGT). A total of 105 children aged 6–7, 8–9, and 10–11 years old carried out the CGT. Children aged 6–7 years old were found to have a lower performance than older children, which shows that the CGT is sensitive to participant's age. The hypothesis that WM plays a significant role in decision making was then tested following two approaches: (a) an experimental approach, comparing between groups the performance on the CGT in a control condition (the CGT only was administered) to that in a double task condition (participants had to carry out a recall task in addition to the CGT); (b) an interindividual approach, probing the relationship between CGT performance and performance on tasks measuring WM efficiency. The between-groups approach evidenced a better performance in the control group. Moreover, the interindividual approach showed that the higher the participants’ WM efficiency was, the higher their performance in the CGT was. Taken together, these two approaches yield converging results that support the hypothesis that WM plays a significant role in decision making in children.