Common manipulator-assisted materials handling tasks were performed in a laboratory simulation at self-selected and faster (paced) speeds. The effects of pacing on peak hand forces, torso kinematics, spine moments and forces, and muscle antagonism were determined, along with any influences of several task variables on these effects. The faster trials were performed 20% more rapidly than the sel...

This article presents a cognitive model of distraction and mind-wandering that combines formalizes several existing theories. It assumes task-related goals opportunities for are continuously in competition mental resources. If the goal does not need particular resource at moment, likelihood it is captured by high. We applied this to explain results three experiments differ from each other numbe...

The effects of lesions on syntactic comprehension were studied in thirty-one people with aphasia (PWA). Participants were tested for the ability to parse and interpret four types of syntactic structures and elements - passives, object extracted relative clauses, reflexives and pronouns - in three tasks - object manipulation, sentence picture matching with full sentence presentation and sentence...

Tasks requiring sustained attention tend to show a decline in performance over time—a phenomenon known as the vigilance decrement. Recent research has successfully used task switches to reveal more about this decrement, but the analysis of individual switch factors has not yet been explored. In this study, a sample of 37 undergraduate Psychology students performed a fast-paced sustained attenti...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effects of the load on the human spine during force-paced and self-paced lifting and subsequent rest. Five women and five men worked under self-paced and force-paced (4 lifts/min) conditions on two days lifting a box for 30 min. The weight of the box was determined by the rating of acceptable load (RAL) method. During the work the lift rate was o...

Abstract. The aim of this experiment was to test the immediate effects slow-paced breathing on executive function. Slow-paced is suggested increase cardiac vagal activity, and neurovisceral integration model predicts that higher activity leads better functioning. In total, 78 participants (41 men, 37 women; M age = 23.22 years) took part in two counterbalanced experimental conditions: a 3 × 5 m...

this article reports on the findings of a study that investigated the impact of manipulating task performance conditions on listening task performance by learners of english as a foreign language (efl). the study was designed to explore the effects of changing complexity dimensions on listening task performance and to achieve two aims: to see how listening comprehension task performance was aff...

In this study, we compared brain activation patterns in men and women during performance of a fine motor task, in order to investigate the influence of motor task complexity upon asymmetries of hemispheric recruitment. Thirty-three right-handed participants (17 males, 16 females) performed a self-paced finger-tapping task comprising three conditions of increasing complexity with both the domina...

How do we learn causal relations between events from experience? Many have argued for an associative account inspired by animal conditioning models, but there is a growing literature arguing that indirect effects in contingency learning depend on explicit cognitive processes. Our experiments explore the basis of two such effects: blocking and screening off. In Experiment 1, we gave participants...