Search results for "Project management"
showing 10 items of 1539 documents
Pupil Diameter May Reflect Motor Control and Learning
2017
International audience; Non–luminance-mediated changes in pupil diameter have been used since the first studies by Darwin in 1872 as indicators of clinical, cognitive, and arousal states. However, the relation between processes involved in motor control and changes in pupil diameter remains largely unknown. Twenty participants attempted to compensate random walks of a cursor with a computer mouse to restrain its trajectory within a target circle while the authors recorded their pupil diameters. Two conditions allowed the authors to experimentally manipulate the motor and cognitive components of the task. First, the step size of the cursor's random walk was either large or small leading to 2…
Do mental processes share a domain-general resource?
2010
What determines success and failure in dual-task situations? Many theories propose that the extent to which two activities can be performed concurrently depends on the nature of the information involved in the activities. In particular, verbal and visuospatial activities are thought to be fueled by distinct resources, so that interference occurs between two verbal activities or two visuospatial activities, but little or no interference occurs between verbal and visuospatial activities. The current study examined trade-offs in four dual-task situations in which participants maintained verbal or visuospatial information while concurrently processing either verbal or visuospatial information.…
Maintenance of item and order information in verbal working memory
2017
International audience; Although verbal recall of item and order information is well-researched in short-term memory paradigms, there is relatively little research concerning item and order recall from working memory. The following study examined whether manipulating the opportunity for attentional refreshing and articulatory rehearsal in a complex span task differently affected the recall of item- and order-specific information of the memoranda. Five experiments varied the opportunity for articulatory rehearsal and attentional refreshing in a complex span task, but the type of recall was manipulated between experiments (item and order, order only, and item only recall). The results showed …
Naturalistic study on the usage of smartphone applications among Finnish drivers
2018
We present results from a naturalistic study that tracked how Finnish drivers use their smartphones while on the move. We monitored 30 heavy in-car smartphone users in Finland during June–September 2016, recording the times that they used their phones, the application used at the time of touch (calls excluded), the location and driving speed. Touches per time unit were used as a proxy for estimating visual-manual distraction due to visual-manual tasks. Our data set allows the determining of whether drivers use their phones differently on varying road types (highway, main road, local rural road, urban road). We found that the road type has an effect on phone use but the effect is contrary to…
Electrophysiological correlates of the cognitive control processes underpinning mixing and switching costs
2016
Typically, in task-switching contexts individuals are slower and less accurate when repeating a task in mixed blocks compared to single-task blocks (mixing cost) and when switching to a new task compared to repeating a previous one (switch cost). Previous research has shown that distinct electrophysiological correlates underlie these two phenomena. However, this evidence is not a consistent result. The goal of this study was to better characterize differences between the control processes involved in mixing and switch costs. To this aim, we examined event-related potentials (ERPs) evoked during a cued task-switching experiment. In order to minimize the confounding effects of cognitive deman…
Phonological similarity effect in complex span task
2013
The aim of our study was to test the hypothesis that two systems are involved in verbal working memory; one is specifically dedicated to the maintenance of phonological representations through verbal rehearsal while the other would maintain multimodal representations through attentional refreshing. This theoretical framework predicts that phonologically related phenomena such as the phonological similarity effect (PSE) should occur when the domain-specific system is involved in maintenance, but should disappear when concurrent articulation hinders its use. Impeding maintenance in the domain-general system by a concurrent attentional demand should impair recall performance without affecting…
Dentate spikes and learning : disrupting hippocampal function during memory consolidation can improve pattern separation
2018
Hippocampal dentate spikes (DSs) are short-duration, large-amplitude fluctuations in hilar local field potentials and take place while resting and sleeping. During DSs, dentate gyrus granule cells increase firing while CA1 pyramidal cells decrease firing. Recent findings suggest DSs play a significant role in memory consolidation after training on a hippocampus-dependent, nonspatial associative learning task. Here, we aimed to find out whether DSs are important in other types of hippocampus-dependent learning tasks as well. To this end, we trained adult male Sprague-Dawley rats in a spatial reference memory task, a fixed interval task, and a pattern separation task. During a rest period im…
Time-on-Task in Children with ADHD: An ex-Gaussian Analysis
2013
AbstractAlthough it is widely known that high intra-individual variability (IIV) is a key characteristic of attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), a detailed exploration of the IIV pattern during the time course of a cognitive task has never been carried out. In this study, 30 children with ADHD and 30 controls, were administered the Conners’ Continuous Performance Task (CPT-II). The across-block individual performance of the groups was analyzed using an ex-Gaussian approach, which enabled a clearer understanding of how individual response times (RTs) fluctuate during a task in comparison with conventional measures of central tendency. While the conventional measures showed a sign…
Differences Between Young and Old University Students on a Lexical Decision Task: Evidence Through an Ex-Gaussian Approach
2013
This work compared two common variants of a lexical decision task (LDT) through two different analysis procedures: first, the classical ANOVA method, and second, by fitting the data to an ex-Gaussian distribution function. Two groups of participants (old and young university students) had to perform, blocks of go/no-go and yes/no tasks. Reaction times and error rates were much lower in the go/no-go task than in the yes/no task. Changes in the ex-Gaussian parameter related to attention were found with word frequency but not with the type of LDT tasks. These findings suggest that word frequency shows an attentional cost that is independent of age.
Associations Between Physical and Executive Functions Among Community-Dwelling Older Men and Women
2022
Walking is a complex task requiring the interplay of neuromuscular, sensory, and cognitive functions. Owing to the age-related decline in cognitive and physical functions, walking may be compromised in older adults, for cognitive functions, especially poor performance in executive functions, is associated with slow walking speed. Hence, the aim of this study was to investigate the associations between different subdomains of executive functions and physical functions and whether the associations found differ between men and women. Multiple linear regression analysis was performed on data collected from 314 community-dwelling older adults who did not meet physical activity guidelines but had…