Search results for "Cognitive task"
showing 10 items of 52 documents
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…
The Contingent Negative Variation – An Electrophysiological Correlate of Temporal Processing or Reference Memory?
2014
Abstract In EEG research, the contingent negative variation (CNV) is considered to be strongly related to interval timing (e.g., Macar & Vidal, 2004 ; Macar, Vidal, & Casini, 1999). However, it is discussed controversially whether certain properties of the CNV (e.g., amplitude, peak latency and resolution) directly reflect the process of temporal accumulation or rather processes related to reference memory or decision stages in temporal information processing (van Rijn et al., 2011). This present study was designed in order to investigate the relationship between CNV mean amplitude, CNV resolution, and memory processes as well as processes of temporal accumulation. The task design aimed at …
2012
BackgroundIncreased reaction time variability (RTV) on cognitive tasks requiring a speeded response is characteristic of several psychiatric disorders. In attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), the association with RTV is strong phenotypically and genetically, yet high RTV is not a stable impairment but shows ADHD-sensitive improvement under certain conditions, such as those with rewards. The state regulation theory proposed that the RTV difference score, which captures change from baseline to a rewarded or fast condition, specifically measures ‘state regulation’. By contrast, the interpretation of RTV baseline (slow, unrewarded) scores is debated. We aimed to investigate directly…
Speed in cognitive tasks as an indicator of second/foreign language reading and writing skills
2013
In a cross-sectional study 823 Finnish school children were tested to examine the relation between speed of performance in cognitive and linguistic tasks and second/foreign language reading and writing. Participants were Finnish-speakers with English as foreign language and Russian-speakers with Finnish as second language which made it possible to compare the results across these two language groups. The Finnish group was furthermore divided into three groups by age to see how speed develops with age and education. Groups were tested with a number of cognitive instruments that included measures of speed of performance. Overall, performance on the speed measures improved with age; often, the…
Zur Bewertung zentraler Sprachstörungen mittels objektiver Kriterien: Ein psychophysiologischer Beitrag zur Diskussion der Neuroplastizitätshypothese
1992
Examinations of aphasic patients by using cognitive tasks were based on the hypothesis that semantically evoked potentials correlate to the processing of information in the different speech processing of information in the different speech processing areas. It was found that patients with Broca aphasia generated synchronization potentials in the Wernicke area in contrast to Wernicke patients. We suppose a correlation between the timing in sensorial speech processing areas and the generation of synchronization potentials.