Attentional bias to threat has been almost exclusively examined after participants experienced repeated pairings between a conditioned stimulus (CS) and an aversive unconditioned stimulus (US). This study aimed to determine whether threat-related attentional capture can result from observational learning, when participants acquire knowledge of the aversive qualities of a stimulus without themselves experiencing aversive outcomes. Non-clinical young-adult participants ( = 38) first watched a video of an individual (the demonstrator) performing a Pavlovian conditioning task in which one colour was paired with shock (CS+) and another colour was neutral (CS-).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIt is not always easy to attend to task-relevant information and ignore task-irrelevant distractions. We investigated the impact of task switching and emotional stimuli on goal-oriented selective attention and subsequent recognition memory. Results from two experiments with different stimulus materials (words and images) found that the memory advantage of task-relevant information over task-irrelevant information (i.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlthough humans gain considerable knowledge from young to older adulthood, aging is also associated with cognitive deficits. This study investigated age-related changes in dynamic cognitive control adjustments after cognitive conflicts and errors. Specifically, we compared younger and older adults' time courses of two established phenomena - post-conflict slowing and post-error slowing.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFPeople remember more task-relevant information than task-irrelevant information, and this difference can be conceptualised as memory selectivity. Selectively attending and remembering relevant information is a key ability for goal-directed behaviour and is thus critical for leading an autonomous life. In the present study, we tested the influence of cognitive load on memory selectivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDetecting an error signals the need for increased cognitive control and behavioural adjustments. Considerable development in performance monitoring and cognitive control is evidenced by lower error rates and faster response times in multi-trial executive function tasks with age. Besides these quantitative changes, we were interested in whether qualitative changes in balancing accuracy and speed contribute to developmental progression during elementary school years.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelective attention is relevant for goal directed behavior as it allows people to attend to task-relevant target stimuli and to ignore task-irrelevant distractors. Attentional focus at encoding affects subsequent memory for target and distractor stimuli. Remembering selectively more targets than distractors represents memory selectivity.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAfter perceiving cognitive conflicts or errors, children as well as adults adjust their performance in terms of reaction time slowing on subsequent actions, resulting in the so called post-conflict slowing and post-error slowing, respectively. The development of these phenomena has been studied separately and with different methods yielding inconsistent findings. We aimed to assess the temporal dynamics of these two slowing phenomena within a single behavioral task.
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