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Judgments of liking and beauty appear to be expressions of a common hedonic state, but they differ in how they engage cognitive processes. We hypothesised that beauty judgments place greater demands on limited executive resources than judgments of liking. We tested this hypothesis by asking two groups of participants to judge works of visual art for their beauty or liking while having to remember the location of 1, 3, or 5 dots in a 4 by 4 matrix. We also examined the effect of individual differences in working memory capacity. Our results show that holding information about the location of the dots in working memory delayed judgments of beauty but not of liking. Also, the greater participants' working memory capacity, the faster they completed the working memory task when judging liking, but not when judging beauty. Our study provides evidence that judging beauty draws more on working memory resources than judging liking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Individual differences in reading skill have frequently been related to variability in working memory capacity; however, it is unclear what drives this relation. The present study investigated two attentional control mechanisms that may contribute to this relation: proactive control and online filtering. To examine how the neural mechanisms of these processes relate to individual differences in reading, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data collected during a novel working memory paradigm was correlated with measures of reading skill. Results indicated that skilled readers deployed greater proactive control resources, as evidenced by more activation in left anterior prefrontal regions, when cued proactively about task-relevant features than less-skilled readers. Additionally, high-vocabulary individuals showed online filtering benefits. These findings provide novel contributions to our understanding about the relation between working memory and reading and suggest that proactive control and attentional filtering mechanisms may play a key role in driving this relation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]