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Theories of instruction following assume that language contributes to our ability to understand and implement instructions. The two experiments reported here investigated that assumption. Participants (total N = 96) were required to learn a series of novel tasks, with each task consisting of six arbitrary stimulus-response rules. All tasks were preceded by an instruction phase (a visual depiction of the correct stimulus-response rules for each task), during which participants performed a verbal distractor task (articulatory suppression), a non-verbal distractor task (foot tapping) or no distractor task. Additionally, the duration of the instruction phase was varied so that it was either long (60 s) or short (30 s in Experiment 1, or 10 s in Experiment 2). In both experiments participants made more errors when they had performed articulatory suppression during the instruction interval, compared to the foot tapping and no distractor task conditions. Furthermore, Experiment 2 found that this detrimental effect of articulatory suppression was especially pronounced with a very short instruction duration. These findings demonstrate that language plays a crucial role in the encoding of novel task instructions, especially when instructions are encoded under time pressure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The structure of task representations is widely studied with task-switching procedures in which the experimenter compares performance across predetermined categories of trial transitions (viz., switch costs). This approach has been productive, but relies on experimental assumptions about the relationships among stimulus-response mappings that define a set. Here, we develop a novel method of evaluating structure without relying on such assumptions. Participants responded to centrally presented stimuli and we computed the transitional response times (RTs; changes in RT as a function of specific response sequences) for each response combination. Conventional task-switch analyses revealed costs when the response switched from the left-side to the right or vice versa, but this switch cost was not affected by whether the stimuli belonged to a single category or to two distinct categories. In contrast, the transitional RT analysis provided fine-grained information about relationships among responses and how these relationships were affected by stimulus and response manipulations. Specifically, tasks containing a single stimulus category produced response chains in which neighboring responses had lower transitional RTs, while these chains were broken when two stimulus categories were used. We propose that the transitional RT approach offers a more detailed picture of the underlying task representation that reveals structure not detectable by conventional switch cost measures and does not require a priori assumptions about task organization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Metacognition is often considered a critical component of learning and higher-order cognition; however, does metacognitive accuracy remain constant across all tasks, specifically in tasks that involve physical or procedural components? To investigate the consistency of metacognitive judgments across various task types, participants completed word and number recall tasks, and also completed three simple physical skill tasks (e.g., catching a ball in a cup). Participants made metacognitive judgments about their performance in all tasks. Results indicated that while participants demonstrated traditional levels of relative metacognitive accuracy in more cognitive tasks, participants were significantly more accurate in their judgments for physical skill tasks. In other words, relative accuracy for metacognitive judgments in physical tasks appears to be significantly higher than for cognitive tasks. This represents the first such demonstration of this effect and suggests that characteristics of physical tasks somehow improve participants' judgments of how well they have learned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The cognitive processes underlying the ability of human performers to trade speed for accuracy is often conceptualized within evidence accumulation models, but it is not yet clear whether and how these models can account for decision-making in the presence of various sources of conflicting information. In the present study, we provide evidence that speed-accuracy tradeoffs (SATs) can have opposing effects on performance across two different conflict tasks. Specifically, in a single preregistered experiment, the mean reaction time (RT) congruency effect in the Simon task increased, whereas the mean RT congruency effect in the Eriksen task decreased, when the focus was put on response speed versus accuracy. Critically, distributional RT analyses revealed distinct delta plot patterns across tasks, thus indicating that the unfolding of distractor-based response activation in time is sufficient to explain the opposing pattern of congruency effects. In addition, a recent evidence accumulation model with the notion of time-varying conflicting information was successfully fitted to the experimental data. These fits revealed task-specific time-courses of distractor-based activation and suggested that time pressure substantially decreases decision boundaries in addition to reducing the duration of non-decision processes and the rate of evidence accumulation. Overall, the present results suggest that time pressure can have multiple effects in decision-making under conflict, but that strategic adjustments of decision boundaries in conjunction with different time-courses of distractor-based activation can produce counteracting effects on task performance with different types of distracting sources of information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Maquestiaux, Lyphout-Spitz, Ruthruff, and Arexis (2020) demonstrated that ideomotor-compatible (IM) tasks (e.g., pressing the left key when an arrow points left) can operate automatically, entirely bypassing the central bottleneck that constrains dual-task performance. But is bottleneck bypassing a specific consequence of IM compatibility or is it due to task ease? To answer this question, we tested the automaticity of a task that was easy but not IM. The task was easy due to the high semantic compatibility between the stimulus and the response: saying "ping" when hearing "pong" and "pong" to "ping" in Experiment 1, saying "low" when hearing "high" and "high" to "low" in Experiment 2. We presented it as Task 2, along with a Task 1 that was not easy, due to the use of an arbitrary stimulus-response mapping. Single-task trials were randomly intermixed with dual-task trials and then used as baselines to assess dual-task costs and to simulate distributions of inter-response intervals (IRIs) predictive of bottleneck bypassing vs. bottlenecking. The results of both experiments provided converging evidence that the entire Task 2 bypassed the bottleneck on virtually all trials: very small dual-task costs, high percentages of response reversals, and a close match between the observed IRI distributions and that predicted by bottleneck bypassing. Neither ideomotor compatibility nor task speed (the semantic task was not particularly fast) explain these findings. We therefore propose that the key to bypassing the central bottleneck is the ease with which people can fully load the stimulus-response mapping into working memory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Estimating the reliability of cognitive task datasets is commonly done via split-half methods. We review four methods that differ in how the trials are split into parts: a first-second half split, an odd-even trial split, a permutated split, and a Monte Carlo-based split. Additionally, each splitting method could be combined with stratification by task design. These methods are reviewed in terms of the degree to which they are confounded with four effects that may occur in cognitive tasks: effects of time, task design, trial sampling, and non-linear scoring. Based on the theoretical review, we recommend Monte Carlo splitting (possibly in combination with stratification by task design) as being the most robust method with respect to the four confounds considered. Next, we estimated the reliabilities of the main outcome variables from four cognitive task datasets, each (typically) scored with a different non-linear algorithm, by systematically applying each splitting method. Differences between methods were interpreted in terms of confounding effects inflating or attenuating reliability estimates. For three task datasets, our findings were consistent with our model of confounding effects. Evidence for confounding effects was strong for time and task design and weak for non-linear scoring. When confounding effects occurred, they attenuated reliability estimates. For one task dataset, findings were inconsistent with our model but they may offer indicators for assessing whether a split-half reliability estimate is appropriate. Additionally, we make suggestions on further research of reliability estimation, supported by a compendium R package that implements each of the splitting methods reviewed here. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We describe a mathematically simple yet precise model of activation suppression that can explain the negative-going delta plots often observed in standard Simon tasks. The model postulates a race between the identification of the relevant stimulus attribute and the suppression of irrelevant location-based activation, with the irrelevant activation only having an effect if the irrelevant activation is still present at the moment when central processing of the relevant attribute starts. The model can be fitted by maximum likelihood to observed distributions of RTs in congruent and incongruent trials, and it provides good fits to two previously-reported data sets with plausible parameter values. R and MATLAB software for use with the model is provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The prevalence of media multitasking – the concurrent use of multiple forms of media – has motivated research on whether and how it is related to various cognitive abilities, such as the ability to switch tasks. However, previous research on the relationship between media multitasking and task-switching performance has yielded mixed results, possibly because of small sample sizes and a confound between task and cue transitions that resulted in switch costs being impure measures of task-switching ability. The authors conducted a large-sample study in which media multitasking behavior was surveyed and task-switching performance was assessed using two cues per task, thereby allowing switch costs to be partitioned into task-switching and cue-repetition effects. The main finding was no evidence of any relationship between media multitasking scores and task-switching effects (or cue-repetition effects), either in correlational analyses or in extreme group analyses of light and heavy media multitaskers. The results are discussed in the context of previous research, with implications for studying media multitasking in relation to task-switching performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is debated whether training with a working memory (WM) task, particularly n-back, can improve general WM and reasoning skills. Most training studies found substantial improvement in the trained task, with little to no transfer to untrained tasks. We hypothesized that training does not increase WM capacity, but instead provides opportunities to develop an efficient task-specific strategy. We derived a strategy for the task that optimizes WM resources and taught it to participants. In two sessions, 14 participants who were taught this strategy performed as well as fourteen participants who trained for 40 sessions without strategy instructions. To understand the mechanisms underlying the no-instruction group's improvement, participants answered questionnaires during their training period. Their replies indicate that successful learners discovered the same strategy and their improvement was associated with this discovery. We conclude that n-back training allows the discovery of strategies that enable better performance with the same WM resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literature suggests that semantic similarity has a weak or null effect for immediate serial reconstruction and a facilitative effect for immediate serial recall. These observed semantic similarity effects are inconsistent with the assumptions of short-term memory (STM) models on the detrimental effect of similarity (e.g., confusion) and with observations of a robust detrimental effect of phonological similarity. Our review indicates that the experimental results are likely dependent on the manipulation strength for semantic similarity and that manipulations used in previous studies might have affected semantic assvociation as well as semantic similarity. To address these possible issues, two indices are proposed: (a) strength of manipulation on semantic similarity, gained by quantifying semantic similarity based on Osgood and associates' dimensional view of semantics, and (b) inter-item associative strength, a possible confounding factor. Our review and the results of a meta-regression analysis using these two indices suggest that semantic similarity has a detrimental effect on both serial reconstruction and serial recall, while semantic association, which is correlated with semantic similarity, contributes to an apparent facilitative effect. An effect that is not attributable to similarity or association was also implied. Review on item and order memory further suggests the facilitative effect of semantic association on item memory and the detrimental effect of the semantic similarity on order memory. Based on our findings, we propose a unified explanation of observations of semantic similarity effects for both serial reconstruction and serial recall that is in good accord with STM models. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many perspective-taking and theory of mind tasks require participants to pass over the answer that is optimal from the self-perspective. For instance, in the classic change-of-location (false belief) task, participants are required to ignore where they know the object to be, and in the director task participants are required to ignore the best match for the instruction the other, less knowledgeable agent gives them (e.g., 'the top cup'). However, a second but equally critical requirement in such tasks is the ability to select a response which is wrong from the self-perspective; where the object is not, or an object that does not match the instruction (e.g., the middle cup instead of the top cup from one's own perspective). We present the results of an experiment that teases apart these two effects and demonstrate that both contribute independently to the difficulty in taking other perspectives. Reanalyses of data from previous experiments confirm this dual effect. These results suggest a revision of our understanding of egocentricity and difficulty in perspective-taking generally. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study investigated category learning across two experiments using face-blend stimuli that formed face families controlled for within- and between-category similarity. Experiment 1 was a traditional feedback-based category-learning task, with three family names serving as category labels. In Experiment 2, the shared family name was encountered in the context of a face-full name paired-associate learning task, with a unique first name for each face. A subsequent test that required participants to categorize new faces from each family showed successful generalization in both experiments. Furthermore, perceived similarity ratings for pairs of faces were collected before and after learning, prior to generalization test. In Experiment 1, similarity ratings increased for faces within a family and decreased for faces that were physically similar but belonged to different families. In Experiment 2, overall similarity ratings decreased after learning, driven primarily by decreases for physically similar faces from different families. The post-learning category bias in similarity ratings was predictive of subsequent generalization success in both experiments. The results indicate that individuals formed generalizable category knowledge prior to an explicit demand to generalize and did so both when attention was directed towards category-relevant features (Experiment 1) and when attention was directed towards individuating faces within a family (Experiment 2). The results tie together research on category learning and categorical perception and extend them beyond a traditional category-learning task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his comment on Heck and Erdfelder (2016, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 23, 1440–1465), Starns (2018, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 25, 2406–2416) focuses on the response time-extended two-high-threshold (2HT-RT) model for yes-no recognition tasks, a specific example for the general class of response time-extended multinomial processing tree models (MPT-RTs) we proposed. He argues that the 2HT-RT model cannot accommodate the speed–accuracy trade-off, a key mechanism in speeded recognition tasks. As a remedy, he proposes a specific discrete-state model for recognition memory that assumes a race mechanism for detection and guessing. In this reply, we clarify our motivation for using the 2HT-RT model as an example and highlight the importance and benefits of MPT-RTs as a flexible class of general-purpose, simple-to-use models. By binning RTs into discrete categories, the MPT-RT approach facilitates the joint modeling of discrete responses and response times in a variety of psychological paradigms. In fact, many paradigms either lack a clear-cut accuracy criterion or show performance levels at ceiling, making corrections for incautious responding redundant. Moreover, we show that some forms of speed–accuracy trade-off can in fact not only be accommodated but also be measured by appropriately designed MPT-RTs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Picture naming takes longer in the presence of a semantic-categorically related distractor word compared to an unrelated distractor word. This semantic interference effect in the picture-word interference (PWI) task is an empirical cornerstone in speech production research and of central importance in theory development and evaluation. Prominent models locate the effect at an abstract lexical level, yet only few studies have tested for a possible pre-lexical, conceptual contribution. Moreover, those studies that did are not conclusive. We re-explored the locus of semantic interference by contrasting two task versions that were implemented in as parallel a fashion as possible, but differed with respect to the processing stages involved: naming pictures (requiring conceptual processing and lexical processing) and deciding on their natural size (requiring conceptual processing only). We predicted semantic interference in naming, replicating the standard effect. If part of the effect is localized at the conceptual level, we predicted interference in size decision, too. We found semantic effects in both tasks but with different polarity – interference in naming and facilitation in size decision. This pattern supports the view that semantic interference in PWI has its locus at the lexical level and its origin at the conceptual level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In models such as the search of associative memory (SAM: Gillund & Shiffrin, Psychological Review, 91(1), 1–67 1984) model, associations in paired-associate tasks are only formed between the pair of to-be-remembered items. The temporal context model (TCM: Howard & Kahana, Journal of Mathematical Psychology, 46, 268–299 2002) deviates from SAM by positing that long-range associations are formed between the current item and all previously presented items, even in paired-associate tasks, where cross-pair associations are formed in addition to within-pair associations (Davis, Geller, Rizzuto, & Kahana, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 15, 64–69 2008). We tested this proposal in an associative recognition task by constructing rearranged pairs where the distance in within-list serial position between the two pair members was manipulated between one and five pairs. Models such as TCM would predict that FAR should be highest for rearranged pairs that are constructed from pair members that were adjacent to each other on the study list, whereas models such as SAM predict that FAR should be equal for rearranged pairs regardless of whether they are constructed from adjacent or remote pairs. Results from our experiment and from three archival datasets found that FAR for rearranged pairs did not depend on whether the constituent items came from nearby or remote pairs, suggesting that participants were not forming associations across pairs of items in the task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A contentious issue in contemporary psycholinguistics is whether bilingualism enhances executive functions. Here, we report a meta-analysis of 80 studies (253 effect sizes) comparing performance of monolinguals and bilinguals on non-verbal interference-control tasks, while examining potential moderators of effects on two dependent variables (DVs): global reaction time (RT) and interference cost. We used a multiverse approach to determine how robust conclusions were to several dataset construction and analysis decisions. In our "preferred" analysis, using a broad definition of bilinguals and standard versions of interference-control tasks, there was a very small but significant bilingual advantage for global RT (g =.13), which became non-significant once corrected for publication bias. For interference cost, there was a very small but significant bilingual advantage (g =.11). Effects were not significantly moderated by task or participant age, but were moderated by an interaction between age of second language acquisition (AoA) and the DV. Unexpectedly, larger effect sizes for interference cost were observed for studies involving bilinguals with late as opposed to early AoA. The multiverse analysis produced results largely consistent with the preferred analysis, confirming our conclusion that evidence for a bilingual advantage on interference-control tasks is weak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study was conducted to decipher whether a spatial correspondence effect can emerge in Go/No-Go tasks (cSE, in reference to Donders' type c task) performed in isolation (participant alone in the cubicle). To this aim, a single participant was centrally positioned in front of a device and was required to respond by a hand key-press to the color of the stimulus. Half the participants were seated in front of a table equipped with only one response key and the other half in front of a table equipped with two response keys (one active and the other one useless). Using a substantial number of subjects (48) and trials (960), the present study revealed a numerically small but statistically reliable cSE. This result contrasts with referential coding predictions and suggests that the representation of a concurrently active response is not a prerequisite for the cSE to emerge. Moreover, the presence of a second response button in the participant's peripersonal space exerted no measurable influence on the cSE. The lack of statistical power of numerous previous studies may explain why the cSE has often been considered to be nil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Decision-making involves a tradeoff between pressures for caution and urgency. Previous research has investigated how well humans optimize this tradeoff, and mostly concluded that people adopt a sub-optimal strategy that over-emphasizes caution. This emphasis reduces how many decisions can be made in a fixed time, which reduces the "reward rate". However, the strategy that is optimal depends critically on the timing properties of the experiment design: the slower the rate of decision opportunities, the more cautious the optimal strategy. Previous studies have almost uniformly adopted very fast designs, which favor very urgent decision-making. This raises the possibility that previous findings—that humans adopt strategies that are too cautious—could either be ascribed to human caution, or to the experiments' design. To test this, we used a slowed-down decision-making task in which the optimal strategy was quite cautious. With this task, and in contrast to previous findings, the average strategy adopted across participants was very close to optimal, with about equally many participants adopting too-cautious as too-urgent strategies. Our findings suggest that task design can play a role in inferences about optimality, and that previous conclusions regarding human sub-optimality are conditional on the task settings. This limits claims about human optimality that can be supported by the available evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In dual tasking, the no-go backward crosstalk effect (BCE) means that processing of Task 1 takes longer when Task 2 does not require a response (no-go trial) than when it requires a response (go trial). Thus, contrary to the usual observation, giving two successive responses counterintuitively reduces instead of increases performance costs for Task 1. Results from recent studies are in line with the notion that the no-go BCE reflects response inhibition, which is required to overcome an already prepared go response in Task 2, but which also spills over to motor execution in Task 1. No direct test of this hypothesis, however, has been carried out so far, and hence the present study was designed to fill this gap. The result of this study with n = 48 participants revealed that a no-go Task 2 impeded Task 1 performance when preparation of the Task 2 response was encouraged, but facilitated Task 1 performance when preparation of the Task 2 response was not encouraged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Creating a visual representation of an item through drawing affords that item a substantive memory benefit, relative to several control tasks. Recent findings demonstrate the robustness of this drawing effect across several stimulus classes, irrespective of encoding time, setting, age group, or memory measure. The advantage for drawn information has been attributed to the integrated contributions of at least three components of visual production through drawing, which can independently facilitate memory: elaborative, motoric, and pictorial. In the current work, we investigated the importance of the elaborative process one must engage in while preparing to draw, and directly tested whether this generative period alone was sufficient to improve memory. Participants were prompted to either draw or write out presented words, and were provided with a 1- or 2-s preparatory period prior to completing the prompted task. Critically, on a subset of the trials, participants were prevented from completing the prompted task. There was strong evidence in support of better memory for drawn items, which replicates the drawing effect commonly observed in prior work. Interestingly, following prompts to draw, there was also a reliable memory benefit of the preparatory period alone. In other words, simply engaging in the elaborative process of preparing to draw (i.e., without completing the drawing) was enough to produce a reliable increase in later memory relative to actually writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our daily life, we often encounter situations in which different features of several multidimensional objects must be perceived simultaneously. There are two types of environments of this kind: environments with multidimensional objects that have unique feature associations, and environments with multidimensional objects that have mixed feature associations. Recently, we (Goldfarb & Treisman, 2013) described the association effect, suggesting that the latter type causes behavioral perception difficulties. In the present study, we investigated this effect further by examining whether the effect is determined via a feedforward visual path or via a high-order task demand component. In order to test this question, in Experiment 1 a set of multidimensional objects were presented while we manipulated the letter case of a target feature, thus creating a visually different but semantically equivalent object, in terms of its identity. Similarly, in Experiment 2 artificial groups with different physical properties were created according to the task demands. The results indicated that the association effect is determined by the task demands, which create the group of reference. The importance of high-order task demand components in the association effect is further discussed, as well as the possible role of the neural synchrony of object files in explaining this effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study investigated whether the advanced reconfiguration processes of the voluntary switching (VTS) paradigm were different from those of the instructed task switching (ITS) paradigm by examining event-related potentials (ERPs) in a within-subjects design. Of importance, given that effector-to-task mapping might lead to differential preparatory strategies, two effector-to-task mapping groups were studied: the hand-to-task (HAND) and finger-to-task (FINGER) groups. Intriguingly, we found the increased posterior negativity for voluntary switch (and/or increased posterior positivity for voluntary repeat) was exclusive to the HAND group, whereas the increased switch-related late posterior positivity in the ITS paradigm was independent of the effector manipulation. Moreover, the lateralized readiness potentials (LRP) and the mu and beta motor-related amplitude asymmetries indicated that the differential switch-related modulations were not the byproduct of hand-specific preparation. The advanced preparatory strategies in the VTS and ITS paradigms are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of inhibition plays a major role in cognitive psychology. In the present article, we review the evidence for the inhibition of task sets. In the first part, we critically discuss empirical findings of task inhibition from studies that applied variants of the task-switching methodology and argue that most of these findings—such as switch cost asymmetries—are ambiguous. In the second part, we focus on n—2 task-repetition costs, which currently constitute the most convincing evidence for inhibition of task sets. n—2 repetition costs refer to the performance impairment in sequences of the ABA type relative to CBA, which can be interpreted in terms of persisting inhibition of previously abandoned tasks. The available evidence suggests that inhibition is primarily triggered by conflict at selection of stimulus attributes and at the response level. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inattentional blindness refers to a failure to consciously detect an irrelevant object that appears without any expectation when attention is engaged with another task. The perceptual load theory predicts that task-irrelevant stimuli will reach awareness only when the primary task is of low load, which allows processing resources to spill over to processing task-irrelevant stimuli as well. We studied whether perceptual load has an effect on inattentional blindness for a task-irrelevant stimulus whose meaning is or is not relevant to the attentional goals of the observer. In the critical trial, a word appeared without any expectation in the center of a display of attended pictures. The results showed that, under both high and low load, unexpected words belonging to the attended semantic category were detected more often than semantically unrelated words. These results imply that task-irrelevant stimuli, whose meanings are relevant to the observer's task, enter awareness irrespective of perceptual load. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A growing number of researchers use descriptive distributions such as the ex-Gaussian and the shifted Wald to summarize response time data for speeded two-choice tasks. Some of these researchers also assume that the parameters of these distributions uniquely correspond to specific cognitive processes. We studied the validity of this cognitive interpretation by relating the parameters of the ex-Gaussian and shifted Wald distributions to those of the Ratcliff diffusion model, a successful model whose parameters have well-established cognitive interpretations. In a simulation study, we fitted the ex-Gaussian and shifted Wald distributions to data generated from the diffusion model by systematically varying its parameters across a wide range of plausible values. In an empirical study, the two descriptive distributions were fitted to published data that featured manipulations of task difficulty, response caution, and a priori bias. The results clearly demonstrate that the ex-Gaussian and shifted Wald parameters do not correspond uniquely to parameters of the diffusion model. We conclude that researchers should resist the temptation to interpret changes in the ex-Gaussian and shifted Wald parameters in terms of cognitive processes. Supporting materials may be downloaded from http://pbr.psychonomic-journals .org/content/supplemental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main aim of this study was to explore the extent to which the number of associates of a word (NoA) influences lexical access, in four tasks that focus on different processes of visual word recognition: lexical decision, reading aloud, progressive demasking, and online sentence reading. Results consistently showed that words with a dense associative neighborhood (high-NoA words) were processed faster than words with a sparse neighborhood (low-NoA words), extending previous findings from English lexical decision and categorization experiments. These results are interpreted in terms of the higher degree of semantic richness of high-NoA words as compared with low-NoA words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Taylor and Lupker (2001) reported that in a naming task, stimuli were named more rapidly when preceded by an easy-to-name stimulus than when preceded by a difficult-to-name stimulus (sequential effects). The goal of the present research was to investigate whether sequential effects could be explained in terms of time perception processes (within the context of Lupker, Brown, and Colombo's [1997] time criterion account). Participants were required to name easy and difficult stimuli (high-frequency words and nonwords in Experiment 1; words only in Experiment 2). Each naming trial was followed by a set of asterisks (*****). The participants were required to press a button when they thought the asterisks had been presented for exactly 1 sec. Time intervals produced after naming difficult stimuli were longer than time intervals produced after naming easy stimuli. That is, time perception was affected by the difficulty of word/nonword naming in a way that carried over to the next stimulus, supporting the idea that carryover effects in time perception may be the source of sequential effects in the naming task. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies have shown that task sets could be configured endogenously (i.e., on the basis of memory) according to an explicit sequence or exogenously according to a task cue. In two experiments, we examined whether an implicitly learned sequence could facilitate task set configuration without participants' intention. These experiments led to opposite conclusions regarding this question, but their methodology made it impossible to distinguish between the interpretations. Wealtered the task-switching paradigm by embedding a hidden task sequence, while randomizing all other aspects, including perceptual (i.e., task cues) and motor elements. We found that a sequence of tasks, proper, was learned implicitly and that the memory of that sequence endogenously facilitated task decision processes without the participants' explicit knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]