Practice makes better? The influence of increased practice on task conflict in the Stroop task.

The Stroop task is widely used to study attentional control and cognitive flexibility. However, questions about its sensitivity to training and the impact of task conflict on attentional control remain open. We investigated the effects of practice and task conflict on attentional control in the Stroop task, with participants completing four sessions of a Stroop task over 3 weeks in low and high task-conflict conditions.

The approximate number system represents rational numbers: The special case of an empty set.

We agree with Clarke and Beck that the approximate number system represents rational numbers, and we demonstrate our support by highlighting the case of the empty set - the non-symbolic manifestation of zero. It is particularly interesting because of its perceptual and semantic uniqueness, and its exploration reveals fundamental new insights about how numerical information is represented.

Sometimes nothing is simply nothing: Automatic processing of empty sets.

Previous work using the numerical comparison task has shown that an empty set, the nonsymbolic manifestation of zero, can be represented as the smallest quantity of the numerical magnitude system. In this study, we examined whether an empty set can be represented as such under conditions of automatic processing in which deliberate processing of stimuli magnitudes is not required by the task. In Experiment 1, participants performed physical and numerical comparisons of empty sets (i.

Nonsymbolic and symbolic representations of null numerosity.

Previous research has shown that null numerosity can be processed as a numerical entity that is represented together with non-null numerosities on the same magnitude system. The present study examined which conditions enable perceiving nonsymbolic (i.e.

On the indicators for perceiving empty sets as zero.

The question whether human beings process empty sets as zero has received little research attention. In this study, we used the distance and end effects as indicators for treating empty sets as a numerical entity that represents an absence of quantity. In a series of experiments, participants performed a magnitude comparison task.