Emotion regulation is essential for adaptive functioning and social integration. However, it is not clear to what extent the responsible brain mechanisms are similar to those invoked in cognitive control in a non-emotional context. The aim of this study was to compare the neural circuitry of cognitive and emotional interference resolution in healthy adolescents, employing variants of the counti...

The attentional response times influence the capacity to manage cognitive and behavioral activities. This study investigated the agerelated changes of the “attentional activity rate”, i.e., the speed of the attentional responses in elderly adults. The role of cognitive functioning and gender were also analysed. Participants were 240 old adults aged from 65 to 85 years. The response times during...

OBJECTIVE Impaired self-monitoring is considered a critical deficit of schizophrenia. The authors asked whether this is a specific and isolable impairment or is part of a global disturbance of cognitive and attentional functions. METHOD Internal monitoring of erroneous actions, as well as three components of attentional control (conflict resolution, set switching, and preparatory attention) w...

Neuroscience research indicates that individual differences in anxiety may be attributable to a neural system for threat-processing, involving the amygdala, which modulates attentional vigilance, and which is more sensitive to fearful than angry faces. Complementary cognitive studies indicate that high-anxious individuals show enhanced visuospatial orienting towards angry faces, but it is uncle...

Cognitive measures that are sensitive to biological markers of Alzheimer disease (AD) pathology are needed to (a) facilitate preclinical staging, (b) identify individuals who are at the highest risk for developing clinical symptoms, and (c) serve as endpoints for evaluating the efficacy of interventions. The present study assesses the utility of two cognitive composite scores of attentional con...

Decreased cognitive control over prepotent responses has been hypothesized to contribute to ethanol-induced behavioral disinhibition. However, the effects of ethanol on specific cognitive domains associated with decision making have not been extensively studied. We examined the impact of acute ethanol administration on cognitive performance of nonhuman primates. Studies were conducted using 0.2...

Article history: Received 23 April 2008 Received in revised form 1 August 2008 Accepted 1 August 2008 Available online 13 September 2008 Elementary cognitive tasks (ECTs) are simple tasks involving basic cognitive processes for which speed of performance typically correlates with IQ. Inspection time (IT) has the strongest IQ correlations and is considered critical evidence for neural speed unde...

Working memory capacity reflects a core ability of the individual that affects performance on many cognitive tasks. Recent work has suggested that an important covariate of memory capacity is attentional control, and specifically that low-capacity individuals are more susceptible to attentional capture by distractors than high-capacity individuals are, with the latter being able to resist captu...

Research with children has shown that vicarious learning can result in changes to 2 of Lang's (1968) 3 anxiety response systems: subjective report and behavioral avoidance. The current study extended this research by exploring the effect of vicarious learning on physiological responses (Lang's final response system) and attentional bias. The study used Askew and Field's (2007) vicarious learnin...

Previous studies on attentional biases often show contradictory results. This suggests that important moderating variables have been neglected so far. We suggest that (1) control over potential consequences and (2) satisfaction with the current status are important factors that need to be considered. We explored the influence of these variables using a colour classification task, where colours ...