Benefits to lexical access are provided by acoustically-cued speaker characteristics (such as gender and age), but little work has investigated these effects in meaning-based tasks. Word recognition is affected both by a word’s base-level activation and by associative spread of activation among words, and is correlated with speed of lexical access. In a free association task and a semantic prim...

An ongoing controversy concerns whether executive control mechanisms can actively reconfigure the cognitive system in preparation for switching to a new task set. To address this question, we recorded brain activity from 14 healthy participants, using event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging, while they performed a cued attention task. Critically, in any particular trial, the cued ta...

The purpose of this research was to analyze EFL writing tasks in the most popular ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) exam preparation courses in Iran: IELTS, TOEFL, FCE and CAE. Having collected the criteria of writing task appropriateness in light of the process-oriented approach to writing instruction, 114 learner participants were asked to rate EFL writing tasks based on a checkl...

Seven-year-olds completed a Posner cued attention task, under both neutral and affectively charged conditions. Compared to the traditional (affect-neutral) Posner task, performance in the affective Posner task was marked by dramatic decreases in reaction times (RTs), an increase in errors, an increased validity effect (difference in RTs to the cued vs. uncued trials), and increased electrocorti...

UNLABELLED Studies of visual attention in monkeys typically measure neuronal activity when the stimulus event to be detected occurs at a cued location versus when it occurs at an uncued location. But this approach does not address how neuronal activity changes relative to conditions where attention is unconstrained by cueing. Human psychophysical studies have used neutral cueing conditions and ...

Regional brain activity, measured by H215O PET, was investigated during recognition memory and word-stem cued recall of words in order to compare the neural correlates of two components of memory retrieval-effort and success-as a function of task. For each task there was a baseline and two retrieval conditions. In one retrieval condition (zero density), none of the test items corresponded to wo...