This study examined attentional processes underlying skilled motor performance in threatening situations. Twenty-four trained participants performed a simulated rally driving task under conditions designed either to direct the focus of attention toward the explicit monitoring of driving or a distracting secondary task. Performance (lap time) was compared with a "driving only" control condition....

Social and Personality Psychology Compass 2016; 10: 59 Abstract People often immerse themselves in dreams and fantasies about a desired future. Though such future fantasies are pleasant, they do not necessarily lead to the effort required to attain the desired future. Indeed, the more positively people fantasize about their desired futures, the less effort they invest and the less successful th...

One of the driving forces in social cognition has been the goal of understanding the mental mechanisms that can produce the large array of paradoxical findings that have excited social psychology students for half a century. From persuasion to person perception, decision making to dissonance, and judgment to job descrimination, the distinction between automatic and controlled processes has prov...

Keeping track of various amounts of social cognitive information, including people's mental states, traits, and relationships, is fundamental to navigating social interactions. However, to date, no research has examined which brain regions support variable amounts of social information processing ("social load"). We developed a social working memory paradigm to examine the brain networks sensit...

The role of task prioritization in performance tradeoffs during multi-tasking has received widespread attention. However, little is known on whether people have preferences regarding tasks, and if so, whether these preferences conflict with priority instructions. Three experiments were conducted with a high-speed driving game and an auditory memory task. In Experiment 1, participants did not re...

Fast-acting amplitude compression is used extensively in the professional audio industry. Such compression can impede perception of the independent sound sources within a complex signal. However, listeners may partially compensate for this by using greater mental effort. To test this idea, young, normal-hearing university students were required to report the keywords from two simultaneously pre...

We validated the usability of a new infusion pump interface designed with a situated Cognitive Engineering approach by comparing it to a reference interface using a novel testing method employing repeated measurements and process measures, in addition to traditional outcome measures. The sample consisted of 25 nurses who performed eight critical tasks three times. Performance measures consisted...

This study deals with the instructional efficiency of integrating text and animation into computer-based science instruction. The participants were 84 seventh-grade students in a private primary school in Istanbul. The efficiency of instruction was measured by mental effort and performance level of the learners. The results of the study showed that processing integrated text and animation forma...

During the rehabilitation process, individuals who have experienced a total or partial loss of upper limbs are exposed to many risks. Besides this, a great mental effort is required during the training phase to adapt to a real prosthesis. In many cases, the use of Virtual Reality in Medicine has proven to be an excellent tool for evaluation and support as well as to mitigate risk and to reduce ...

The subliminal mere exposure effect (SMEE) is the phenomenon wherein people tend to prefer patterns they have repeatedly observed without consciously identifying them. One popular explanation for the SMEE is that perceptual fluency within exposed patterns is misattributed to a feeling of preference for those patterns. Assuming that perceptual fluency is negatively correlated with the amount of ...