Search results for " TAS"
showing 10 items of 721 documents
Cognitive performance and emotion are indifferent to ambient color
2017
Folklore has it that ambient color has the power to relax or arouse the observer and enhance performance when executing cognitive tasks. We picked a number of commercially available colors that allegedly have the power to alter cognitive performance and the emotional state, and exposed subjects to them while solving a battery of cognitive tasks. The colors were “Cool Down Pink”, which is said to produce relaxing effects and reduce effort, “Energy Red”, allegedly enhancing performance via increased arousal, “Relaxing Blue”, which is said to enhance attention and concentration, as well as white as a control. In a between-subjects design, a total of 170 high school students carried out five ta…
Disentangling the effects of optimism and attributions on feelings of success
2014
Two experiments examined the effects of dispositional optimism and attributions on feelings of success in a performance setting. In Experiment 1, participants successfully solved three cognitive tasks and attributed the success either internally (i.e., to themselves) or externally (i.e., to a teammate). We found no effect of optimism, but a significant effect of the attribution: Internal attribution predicted an increase in feelings of success. In Experiment 2, we replicated the design and adopted an extreme groups approach in order to include the extremes of the optimism dimension. Only optimism affected feelings of success in this sample: Pessimistic participants showed higher increases i…
The Effect of Corrective Feedback on Performance in Basic Cognitive Tasks: An Analysis of RT Components
2016
[EN] The current work examines the effect of trial-by-trial feedback about correct and error responding on performance in two basic cognitive tasks: a classic Stroop task (n = 40) and a color-word matching task (n = 30). Standard measures of both RT and accuracy were examined in addition to measures obtained from fitting the ex-Gaussian distributional model to the correct RTs. For both tasks, RTs were faster in blocks of trials with feedback than in blocks without feedback, but this difference was not significant. On the other hand, with respect to the distributional analyses, providing feedback served to significantly reduce the size of the tails of the RT distributions. Such results sugge…
Attention and Planning in Older Adults
1997
In a study with 48 adults between 65 and 97 years of age, we examined the influence of working memory, inhibitory efficiency, and attentional flexibility on the ability to solve efficiently a complex planning task: 26 of the subjects were living independently in their own home, and 22 subjects were recruited from nursing homes. Subjects first participated in a number of cognitive ability tests. They then had to plan a trip for a group of 20 people. The results indicate that inhibitory efficiency combined with the flexible use of attentional resources can account for substantial amounts of variance in the planning task. The results support the view that chronological age does not necessaril…
Fronto-parietal homotopy in resting-state functional connectivity predicts task-switching performance
2021
Homotopic functional connectivity reflects the degree of synchrony in spontaneous activity between homologous voxels in the two hemispheres. Previous studies have associated increased brain homotopy and decreased white matter integrity with performance decrements on different cognitive tasks across the life-span. Here, we correlated functional homotopy, both at the whole-brain level and specifically in fronto-parietal network nodes, with task-switching performance in young adults. Cue-to-target intervals (CTI: 300 vs. 1200 ms) were manipulated on a trial-by-trial basis to modulate cognitive demands and strategic control. We found that mixing costs, a measure of task-set maintenance and moni…
Surviving task interruptions: Investigating the implications of long-term working memory theory
2006
Typically, we have several tasks at hand, some of which are in interrupted state while others are being carried out. Most of the time, such interruptions are not disruptive to task performance. Based on the theory of Long-Term Working Memory (LTWM; Ericsson, K.A., Kintsch, W., 1995. Long-term working memory. Psychological Review, 102, 211-245), we posit that unless there are enough mental skills and resources to encode task representations to retrieval structures in long-term memory, the resulting memory traces will not enable reinstating the information, which can lead to memory losses. However, once encoded to LTWM, they are virtually safeguarded. Implications of the theory were tested in…
Impact of Perceived Stress and Immune Status on Decision-Making Abilities during COVID-19 Pandemic Lockdown.
2021
The ability to make risky decisions in stressful contexts has been largely investigated in experimental settings. We examined this ability during the first months of COVID-19 pandemic, when in Italy people were exposed to a prolonged stress condition, mainly caused by a rigid lockdown. Participants among the general population completed two cognitive tasks, an Iowa Gambling Task (IGT), which measures individual risk/reward decision-making tendencies, and a Go/No-Go task (GNG), to test impulsivity, together with two questionnaires, the Perceived Stress Scale and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales. The Immune Status Questionnaire was additionally administered to explore the impact of t…
High cognitive sensitivity to activational effects of testosterone in parents of offspring with autism spectrum disorders
2014
Abstract The existence of mild forms of autistic-like characteristics in parents of children with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) has been defined as a broader autistic phenotype (BAP). Excessive prenatal exposure to testosterone (T) seems to play a role in its development. The aims of this study were to characterize whether ASD parents show masculinized brains or high T prenatal exposure compared to a normative population, using cognitive questionnaires, and also to examine the T level changes in response to different cognitive tasks. ASD parents were found to present higher autistic and lower empathic trait scores than controls. They also have higher T levels and magnitude of T response …
Evidence for general cognitive ability (g ) in heterogeneous stock mice and an analysis of potential confounds
2002
The heterogeneous stock (HS) is a genetically outbred line of mice established more than 30 years ago from an 8-way cross of C57BL/6, BALB/c, RIII, AKR, DBA/2, I, A/J and C3H inbred mouse strains. The present study compared the performance of 40 HS mice across a battery of diverse cognitive tasks under a variety of motivations. Indices of emotionality were also included in order to assess their influence on performance. All measures of ability loaded positively on an unrotated first principal component that accounted for 31% of the variance, suggesting the presence of a common factor of general cognitive ability (g) underlying all tasks. A first factor derived from anxiety indices correlate…
Affective consequences of optimism and pessimism in the face of failure: Evidence of a moderation by attribution
2015
Abstract The present experiment set out to investigate the affective consequences of dispositional optimism and attribution in performance settings. Optimistic and pessimistic participants ( N = 42 each) experienced failure at solving two cognitive tasks in an alleged team setting. The failure could either be attributed to themselves (internal condition) or a teammate (external condition). We found disordinal interactions of optimism and attribution on the feelings of success and feelings of failure. While the affective state of optimists deteriorated significantly if they attributed the failure internally compared to externally, pessimists were emotionally unaffected by the locus of attri…