Implicit mind perception alters vigilance performance because of cognitive conflict processing.

Knowing the internal states of others is essential to predicting behavior in social interactions and requires that the general characteristic of "having a mind" is granted to our interaction partners. Mind perception is a highly automatic process and can potentially cause a cognitive conflict when interacting with agents whose mind status is ambiguous, such as artificial agents. We investigate whether mind perception negatively impacts performance on tasks involving artificial agents because of cognitive conflict processing caused by a potentially increased difficulty to categorize them as human versus nonhuman.

Neuroticism and vigilance revisited: A transcranial doppler investigation.

Selecting for vigilance assignments remains an important factor in human performance research. The current study revisits the potential relationship between vigilance performance and trait neuroticism, in light of two possible theories. The first theory suggests that neuroticism impairs vigilance performance by competing for available resources.

The effects of self-control on cognitive resource allocation during sustained attention: a transcranial Doppler investigation.

Vigilance, or sustained attention, is a required ability in many operational professions. While past research has consistently indicated that vigilance performance declines over time, referred to as the vigilance decrement, the theoretical mechanisms underlying the decrement continue to be explored. In the current study, trait self-control was examined to determine how this individual differences measure may contribute to the theoretical explanation of vigilance decrement.

Do age-related increases in tip-of-the-tongue experiences signify episodic memory impairments?

Tip-of-the-tongue experiences (TOTs), in which a name is known but cannot be immediately retrieved from memory, can be a cause of concern if these experiences are viewed as a sign of memory decline. The current study was conducted to investigate the relation between age and TOT frequency, and the influence of episodic memory, which is the type of memory most often assessed to detect memory problems, on that relation. In a sample of adults, increased age was found to be associated with more TOTs across different types of materials, and additional analyses suggested that these relations between age and TOT frequency were not attributable to the use of different response criteria or to different amounts of knowledge.