Dyslexic individuals orient but do not sustain visual attention: Electrophysiological support from the lower and upper alpha bands.

Individuals with developmental dyslexia have been characterized by problems with attentional orienting. In the current study, we specifically focused on possible changes in endogenous visual orienting that may be reflected in the electroencephalogram. A variant of the Posner cuing paradigm was employed with valid or invalid central cues that preceded target stimuli that were presented in the left or right visual field.

Does mindfulness training modulate the influence of spatial attention on the processing of intracutaneous electrical stimuli?

Mindfulness based stress reduction (MBSR) training has been proposed to improve attentional skills by modulating thalamo-cortical loops that affect the sensitivity of relevant cortical areas like the somatosensory cortex. This modulation may be reflected in the electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha rhythm, and could affect the processing of subsequently applied intracutaneous electrical stimuli. Participants took part in an MBSR training and participated in two EEG sessions.

Why Does Positive Mental Health Buffer Against Psychopathology? An Exploratory Study on Self-Compassion as a Resilience Mechanism and Adaptive Emotion Regulation Strategy.

Growing evidence suggests that positive mental health or wellbeing protects against psychopathology. How and why those who flourish derive these resilient outcomes is, however, unknown. This exploratory study investigated if -, as it continuously provides a friendly, accepting and situational context for negative experiences, functions as a resilience mechanism and adaptive emotion regulation strategy that protects against psychopathology for those with high levels of positive mental health.

The Existential Concerns Questionnaire (ECQ)-Development and Initial Validation of a New Existential Anxiety Scale in a Nonclinical and Clinical Sample.

Objective: Existential anxiety (EA) is a construct that refers to fears that are provoked by core threats of human existence, such as death, meaninglessness, and fundamental loneliness. The objective of this study was to develop an EA measure that can be used in research and clinical practice.

Method: The Existential Concerns Questionnaire (ECQ) was completed by a nonclinical sample of 389 adults, together with questionnaires measuring death anxiety, intolerance of uncertainty, neuroticism, distress, meaning, and life events.

Comparing the effects of sustained and transient spatial attention on the orienting towards and the processing of electrical nociceptive stimuli.

We examined whether sustained vs. transient spatial attention differentially affect the processing of electrical nociceptive stimuli. Cued nociceptive stimuli of a relevant intensity (low or high) on the left or right forearm required a foot pedal press.

Post-error slowing in sequential action: an aging study.

PREVIOUS STUDIES DEMONSTRATED SIGNIFICANT DIFFERENCES IN THE LEARNING AND PERFORMANCE OF DISCRETE MOVEMENT SEQUENCES ACROSS THE LIFESPAN: Young adults (18-28 years) showed more indications for the development of (implicit) motor chunks and explicit sequence knowledge than middle-aged (55-62 years; Verwey et al., 2011) and elderly participants (75-88 years; Verwey, 2010). Still, even in the absence of indications for motor chunks, the middle-aged and elderly participants showed some performance improvement too.

Control of automated behavior: insights from the discrete sequence production task.

Work with the discrete sequence production (DSP) task has provided a substantial literature on discrete sequencing skill over the last decades. The purpose of the current article is to provide a comprehensive overview of this literature and of the theoretical progress that it has prompted. We start with a description of the DSP task and the phenomena that are typically observed with it.

Evidence for graded central processing resources in a sequential movement task.

In the present experiment, we examined slowing of the individual key presses of a familiar keying sequence by four different versions of a concurrent tone counting task. This was done to determine whether the same cognitive processor that has previously been assumed by the dual processor model (DPM) to initiate familiar keying sequences and assist in their execution, is involved also in the central processes of a very different task (viz. identifying tones and counting target tones).

Context-dependent motor skill: perceptual processing in memory-based sequence production.

Previous studies have shown that motor sequencing skill can benefit from the reinstatement of the learning context-even with respect to features that are formally not required for appropriate task performance. The present study explored whether such context-dependence develops when sequence execution is fully memory-based-and thus no longer assisted by stimulus-response translations. Specifically, we aimed to distinguish between preparation and execution processes.

The premotor theory of attention as an account for the Simon effect.

The Simon effect refers to the phenomenon that responses are faster when the irrelevant location of a stimulus corresponds with the response location than when these locations do not correspond. In the current paper we examined the viability of an updated version of the premotor theory of attention (PMTA) as an account for the Simon effect. Two predictions were evaluated.

Context-dependent motor skill and the role of practice.

Research has shown that retrieval of learned information is better when the original learning context is reinstated during testing than when this context is changed. Recently, such contextual dependencies have also been found for perceptual-motor behavior. The current study investigated the nature of context-dependent learning in the discrete sequence production task, and in addition examined whether the amount of practice affects the extent to which sequences are sensitive to contextual alterations.

Motor skill learning in the middle-aged: limited development of motor chunks and explicit sequence knowledge.

The present study examined whether middle-aged participants, like young adults, learn movement patterns by preparing and executing integrated sequence representations (i.e., motor chunks) that eliminate the need for external guidance of individual movements.

Decreased load on general motor preparation and visual-working memory while preparing familiar as compared to unfamiliar movement sequences.

Learning movement sequences is thought to develop from an initial controlled attentive phase to a more automatic inattentive phase. Furthermore, execution of sequences becomes faster with practice, which may result from changes at a general motor processing level rather than at an effector specific motor processing level. In the current study, we examined whether these changes are already present during preparation.

Cognitive processing in new and practiced discrete keying sequences.

This study addresses the role of cognitive control in the initiation and execution of familiar and unfamiliar movement sequences. To become familiar with two movement sequences participants first practiced two discrete key press sequences by responding to two fixed series of 6-key specific stimuli. In the ensuing test phase they executed these two familiar and also two unfamiliar keying sequences while there was a two-third chance a tone was presented together with one randomly selected key specific stimulus in each sequence.

Motor learning and chunking in dyslexia.

The authors investigated whether participants with dyslexia had problems with executing discrete keying sequences and with switching between chunks in those sequences. Participants with dyslexia and participants in the control group executed 2 6-key sequences each, with 1 sequence consisting of 2 successive instances of 1 3-key segment (2 x 3 sequence) and the other not involving such a repetition (1 x 6 sequence). The authors assumed that during execution of the 2 x 3 sequence, the same chunk could be reused, whereas during execution of the 1 x 6 sequence a switch between chunks had to be made.

Representations underlying skill in the discrete sequence production task: effect of hand used and hand position.

Various studies suggest that movement sequences are initially learned predominantly in effector-independent spatial coordinates and only after extended practice in effector-dependent coordinates. The present study examined this notion for the discrete sequence production (DSP) task by manipulating the hand used and the position of the hand relative to the body. During sequence learning in Experiment 1, in which sequences were executed by reacting to key-specific cues, hand position appeared important for execution with the practiced but not with the unpracticed hand.