Although dual-task interference is ubiquitous in a variety of task domains, stop-signal studies suggest that response inhibition is not subject to such interference. Nevertheless, no study has directly examined stop-signal performance in a dual-task setting. In two experiments, stop-signal performance was examined in a psychological refractory…

The current study investigated attentional control through active inhibition of the identity of the distractor. Adapting a Stroop paradigm, the distractor word was presented in advance and made to disappear, followed by the presentation of a Stroop stimulus. Participants were instructed to inhibit the distractor in order to reduce its…

Inhibition of Return (IOR, slower reaction times to previously cued or inspected locations) is observed both when eye movements are prohibited, and when the eyes move to the peripheral location and back to the centre before the target appears. It has been postulated that both effects are generated by a common mechanism, the activation of the…

Psychological research has placed great emphasis on inhibitory control due to its integral role in normal cognition and clinical disorders. The stop-signal task and associated measure--stop-signal reaction time (SSRT)--provides a well-established paradigm for measuring response inhibition. However, motivational influences on stop-signal…

Forgetting is frustrating, usually because it is unintended. Other times, one may purposely attempt to forget an event. A global theory of recognition and free recall that explains both types of forgetting and remembering from multiple list experiments is presented. The critical assumption of the model is that both intentional and unintentional…

Voluntary action can be studied by giving participants free choice over which task to perform in response to each presented stimulus. In such experiments, performance costs are observed when participants choose to switch tasks from the previous trial. It has been proposed that these costs primarily index the time-consuming operation of top-down…

Psychophysical studies are reported examining how the context of recent auditory stimulation may modulate the processing of new sounds. The question posed is how recent tone stimulation may affect ongoing performance in a discrimination task. In the task, two complex sounds occurred in successive intervals. A single target component of one complex…

The compound-cue model of cognitive control in task switching explains switch cost in terms of a switch of task cues rather than of a switch of tasks. The present study asked whether the model generalizes to Lag 2 repetition cost (also known as backward inhibition), a related effect in which the switch from B to A in ABA task sequences is costlier…

Predictions derived from the interactive activation (IA) model were tested in 3 experiments using the masked priming technique in the lexical decision task. Experiment 1 showed a strong effect of prime lexicality: Classifications of target words were facilitated by orthographically related nonword primes (relative to unrelated nonword primes) but…

On the premise that committing a word to memory is a type of covert action capable of being stopped, this study merged an item-method directed forgetting paradigm with a stop signal paradigm. The primary dependent measure was immediate recall. Indicating that participants were able to countermand the default instruction to remember, there was an…

Anderson & Green (2001) have recently shown that using an adaptation of the go-no go task, participants can voluntarily inhibit the retrieval of specific memories. We present three experiments in which we try to determine the degree of automaticity involved, and the role of the previous prime-target relation on the development of this inhibitory…

Much of what psychologists know about infant perception and cognition is based on habituation, but the process itself is still poorly understood. Here the authors offer a dynamic field model of infant visual habituation, which simulates the known features of habituation, including familiarity and novelty effects, stimulus intensity effects, and…