Sharing and organizing research products as R packages.

A consensus on the importance of open data and reproducible code is emerging. How should data and code be shared to maximize the key desiderata of reproducibility, permanence, and accessibility? Research assets should be stored persistently in formats that are not software restrictive, and documented so that others can reproduce and extend the required computations. The sharing method should be easy to adopt by already busy researchers.

Contextual recruitment of selective attention can be updated via changes in task relevance.

Evidence across a wide variety of attention paradigms shows that environmental cues can trigger adjustments to ongoing priorities for attending to relevant and irrelevant information. This context-specific control over attention suggests that cognitive control can be both automatic and flexible. For instance, in selective attention tasks, congruency effects are larger for items that appear in a context associated with infrequent conflict than in a context associated with frequent conflict.

Instance theory predicts information theory: Episodic uncertainty as a determinant of keystroke dynamics.

How does prior experience shape skilled performance in structured environments? We use skilled typing of natural text to evaluate correspondence between performance (keystroke timing) and structure in the environment (letter uncertainty). We had ∼350 typists copy-type English text. We reproduced Ostry's (1983) analysis of interkeystroke interval as a function of letter position and word length, that showed prominent first-letter and midword slowing effects.

Measuring Adaptive Control in Conflict Tasks.

The past two decades have witnessed an explosion of interest in the cognitive and neural mechanisms of adaptive control processes that operate in selective attention tasks. This has spawned not only a large empirical literature and several theories but also the recurring identification of potential confounds and corresponding adjustments in task design to create confound-minimized metrics of adaptive control. The resulting complexity of this literature can be difficult to navigate for new researchers entering the field, leading to suboptimal study designs.

The Semantic Librarian: A search engine built from vector-space models of semantics.

Psychologists have made substantial progress at developing empirically validated formal expressions of how people perceive, learn, remember, think, and know. In this article, we present an academic search engine for cognitive psychology that leverages computational expressions of human cognition (vector-space models of semantics) to represent and find articles in the psychological record. The method shows how psychological theory can be used to inform and aid the design of psychologically intuitive computer interfaces.

Parallel regulation of past, present, and future actions during sequencing.

Past, present, and future actions must be regulated online to produce sequences of actions, but the regulation process is not well understood because of measurement limitations. We provide the first direct tests of the parallel action regulation hypothesis during sequencing in humans. We used transcranial magnetic stimulation to probe the level of excitation for flexion of the right index finger during typing.

Memory-guided selective attention: Single experiences with conflict have long-lasting effects on cognitive control.

Adjustments in cognitive control, as measured by congruency sequence effects, are thought to be influenced by both external stimuli and internal goals. However, this dichotomy has often overshadowed the potential contribution of past experience stored in memory. Here, we examine the role of long-term episodic memory in guiding selective attention.

Context-dependent control of attention capture: Evidence from proportion congruent effects.

There are several independent demonstrations that attentional phenomena can be controlled in a context-dependent manner by cues associated with differing attentional control demands. The present set of experiments provide converging evidence that attention-capture phenomena can be modulated in a context-dependent fashion. We determined whether methods from the proportion congruent literature (listwide and item- and context-specific proportion congruent designs) that are known to modulate distractor interference effects in Stroop and flanker tasks are capable of modulating attention capture by salient feature singletons.

Spatial knowledge during skilled action sequencing: Hierarchical versus nonhierarchical representations.

Typists can type 4 to 5 keystrokes per second at around 95% accuracy, yet they appear to have poor declarative knowledge of key locations. Logan and Crump (2011, Psychology of Learning and Motivation, Vol. 54, pp.

The dynamic range of response set activation during action sequencing.

We show that theories of response scheduling for sequential action can be discriminated on the basis of their predictions for the dynamic range of response set activation during sequencing, which refers to the momentary span of activation states for completed and to-be-completed actions in a response set. In particular, theories allow that future actions in a plan are partially activated, but differ with respect to the width of the range, which refers to the number of future actions that are partially activated. Similarly, theories differ on the width of the range for recently completed actions that are assumed to be rapidly deactivated or gradually deactivated in a passive fashion.

The Effect of Carpal Tunnel Release on Typing Performance.

Purpose: To describe the effect of carpal tunnel release (CTR) on typing performance.

Methods: We prospectively studied 27 patients undergoing open CTR. Patient demographics and clinical characteristics including nerve conduction studies, electromyography results, and duration of symptoms were collected.

Context-specific attentional sampling: Intentional control as a pre-requisite for contextual control.

Recent work suggests that environmental cues associated with previous attentional control settings can rapidly and involuntarily adjust attentional priorities. The current study tests predictions from adaptive-learning and memory-based theories of contextual control about the role of intentions for setting attentional priorities. To extend the empirical boundaries of contextual control phenomena, and to determine whether theoretical principles of contextual control are generalizable we used a novel bi-dimensional stimulus sampling task.

Reproducing the location-based context-specific proportion congruent effect for frequency unbiased items: A reply to Hutcheon and Spieler (2016).

Stroop effects can be modulated by context-specific cues associated with different levels of proportion congruent, even for items that appear equally frequently in each context. This result has important theoretical implications, because it rules out frequency-driven learning explanations of context-specific proportion congruent (CSPC) effects and leaves open the possibility that a cue-driven retrieval process can reinstate attentional control settings in a rapid online fashion. The purpose of the present work was to address reproducibility concerns that have been raised about this finding.

Learning to selectively attend from context-specific attentional histories: A demonstration and some constraints.

Multiple lines of evidence from the attention and performance literature show that attention filtering can be controlled by higher level voluntary processes and lower-level cue-driven processes (for recent reviews see Bugg, 2012; Bugg & Crump, 2012; Egner, 2008). The experiments were designed to test a general hypothesis that cue-driven control learns from context-specific histories of prior acts of selective attention. Several web-based flanker studies were conducted via Amazon Mechanical Turk.

False recognition of instruction-set lures.

False remembering has been examined using a variety of procedures, including the Deese-Roediger-McDermott procedure, the false fame procedure and the two-list recognition procedure. We present six experiments in a different empirical framework examining false recognition of words included in the experimental instructions (instruction-set lures). The data show that participants' false alarm rate to instruction-set lures was twice their false alarm rate to standard lures.

Evaluating Amazon's Mechanical Turk as a tool for experimental behavioral research.

Amazon Mechanical Turk (AMT) is an online crowdsourcing service where anonymous online workers complete web-based tasks for small sums of money. The service has attracted attention from experimental psychologists interested in gathering human subject data more efficiently. However, relative to traditional laboratory studies, many aspects of the testing environment are not under the experimenter's control.

Speed-accuracy trade-off in skilled typewriting: decomposing the contributions of hierarchical control loops.

Typing performance involves hierarchically structured control systems: At the higher level, an outer loop generates a word or a series of words to be typed; at the lower level, an inner loop activates the keystrokes comprising the word in parallel and executes them in the correct order. The present experiments examined contributions of the outer- and inner-loop processes to the control of speed and accuracy in typewriting. Experiments 1 and 2 involved discontinuous typing of single words, and Experiments 3 and 4 involved continuous typing of paragraphs.

In Support of a Distinction between Voluntary and Stimulus-Driven Control: A Review of the Literature on Proportion Congruent Effects.

Cognitive control is by now a large umbrella term referring collectively to multiple processes that plan and coordinate actions to meet task goals. A common feature of paradigms that engage cognitive control is the task requirement to select relevant information despite a habitual tendency (or bias) to select goal-irrelevant information. At least since the 1970s, researchers have employed proportion congruent (PC) manipulations to experimentally establish selection biases and evaluate the mechanisms used to control attention.

Prevention and correction in post-error performance: an ounce of prevention, a pound of cure.

Error detection serves 2 different functions: prevention and cure. Prevention engages post-error slowing to reduce future errors, whereas cure engages processes that correct the error. Thus, prevention predicts post-error slowing, and cure does not.

An instance theory of associative learning.

We present and test an instance model of associative learning. The model, Minerva-AL, treats associative learning as cued recall. Memory preserves the events of individual trials in separate traces.

Contextual control over task-set retrieval.

Contextual cues signaling task likelihood or the likelihood of task repetition are known to modulate the size of switch costs. We follow up on the finding by Leboe, Wong, Crump, and Stobbe (2008) that location cues predictive of the proportion of switch or repeat trials modulate switch costs. Their design employed one cue per task, whereas our experiment employed two cues per task, which allowed separate assessment of modulations to the cue-repetition benefit, a measure of lower level cue-encoding processes, and to the task-alternation cost, a measure of higher level processes representing task-set information.

Cognitive illusions of authorship reveal hierarchical error detection in skilled typists.

The ability to detect errors is an essential component of cognitive control. Studies of error detection in humans typically use simple tasks and propose single-process theories of detection. We examined error detection by skilled typists and found illusions of authorship that provide evidence for two error-detection processes.

Hierarchical control and skilled typing: evidence for word-level control over the execution of individual keystrokes.

Routine actions are commonly assumed to be controlled by hierarchically organized processes and representations. In the domain of typing theories, word-level information is assumed to activate the constituent keystrokes required to type each letter in a word. We tested this assumption directly using a novel single-letter probe technique.

A memory-based account of retrospective revaluation.

We adapt an instance model of human memory, Minerva 2, to simulate retrospective revaluation. In the account, memory preserves the events of individual trials in separate traces. A probe presented to memory contacts all traces in parallel and causes each to become active.