In the Emotional Stroop task, trauma-exposed victims are slowed when naming the colour print of trauma-related words, showing the presence of interference. This interference has been assumed to reflect emotional reactions triggered by experience-relevant emotional content which interfere with the task. However, it may equally reflect the activation of task-competing thoughts triggered by experi...

Recent theories of working memory have emphasized the role of inhibition in suppressing irrelevant information. Moreover, psychometric studies have reported that several inhibition tasks with very diverse requirements load on a single inhibition factor. A patient with left inferior frontal damage, Patient M.L., previously reported to have a semantic short-term memory deficit (R. C. Martin & He,...

The electrocortical correlates of the processing of feared/fear-relevant and neutral stimuli were investigated in a pictorial emotional Stroop paradigm with spider phobic, social phobic, and nonphobic subjects. Subjects identified either the color of red or blue pictures of spiders, birds, or flowers (emotional Stroop task) or the object itself (identification task) by pressing different button...

Controlled processing, response inhibition, and set adoption were examined in 51 HIV-1 infected participants and 21 uninfected controls who were administered a vocal reaction time (RT) version of the Stroop task (Stroop-RT; J. R. Stroop, 1935) as well as the traditional 100 item paper-and-pencil version. Response set expectancies on the Stroop-RT were manipulated by presenting 50% of trials in ...

The timing and frequency of spontaneous eyeblinking is thought to be influenced by ongoing internal cognitive or neurophysiological processes, but how precisely these processes influence the dynamics of eyeblinking is still unclear. This study aimed to better understand the functional role of eyeblinking during cognitive processes by investigating the temporal pattern of eyeblinks during the pe...

Gait speed is a measure of health and functioning. Physical cognitive determinants gait are amenable to interventions, but best practices remain unclear. We investigated the effects 12-month physical training (PTCT) on speed, dual-task cost in executive functions (EFs) compared with (PT) (ISRCTN52388040). Community-dwelling older adults, who did not meet activity recommendations, were recruited...

It can be difficult to identify those at risk of suicide because suicidal thoughts are often internalized and not shared with others. Yet to prevent suicide attempts it is crucial to identify suicidal thoughts and actions at an early stage. Past studies have suggested that deficits in attentional control are associated with suicide, with the argument that individuals are unable to inhibit negat...

Recent studies suggest that the response inhibition ability of children can be modified through training. Based on the notion of embodied cognition, we investigated transfer effects of a 7-day training program using a game named "Wesley says" in 8- to 12-year-old children (n = 15). The game consists of providing commands for performing simple body actions, the actual execution of which is condi...

Current clinical and experimental literature strongly supports the phenomenon of reduced pain perception whilst attention is distracted away from noxious stimuli. This study used functional MRI to elucidate the underlying neural systems and mechanisms involved. An analogue of the Stroop task, the counting Stroop, was used as a cognitive distraction task whilst subjects received intermittent pai...

The Stroop effect refers to an increase in response time observed when the word meaning and the stimulus hue do not match. In an incongruent condition, the word 'green' is presented in the color red, whereas in a congruent condition the word 'red' is presented in the color red. To determine at what level of processing the Stroop effect takes place, we recorded event-related potentials while par...