Two psychological refractory period (PRP) experiments were conducted to examine overlapping processing in younger and older adults. A shape discrimination task (triangle or rectangle) for Task 1 (T1) and a lexical-decision task (word or nonword) for Task 2 (T2) were used. PRP effects, response time for T2 increasing as stimulus onset synchrony (SOA) decreased, were obtained for both age groups....

Even though the (untwisted) Whitehead doubling operation kills all known abelian invariants of knots (and makes them topologically slice), we show that it does not kill the rational function that equals to the 2-loop part of the Kontsevich integral.

The present study examined adult age differences in processing emotional faces using a psychological refractory period paradigm. We used both behavioral and event-related potential (P1 component) measures. Task 1 was tone discrimination (fuzzy vs. pure tones) and Task 2 was emotional facial discrimination ("happy" vs. "angry" faces). The stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the two tasks was...

In many situations people need to mentally adopt the (spatial) perspective of other persons, an ability that is referred to as "Level 2 perspective taking." Its underlying processes have been ascribed to mental self-rotation that can be dissociated from mental object-rotation. Recent findings suggest that perspective taking/self-rotation may not require central capacity. By using the psychologi...

The psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm is a dominant research tool in the literature on dual-task performance. In this paradigm a first and second component task (i.e., Task 1 and Task 2) are presented with variable stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and priority to perform Task 1. The main indicator of dual-task impairment in PRP situations is an increasing Task 2-RT with decreasin...

Four reaction time experiments examined the mental rotation process using a psychological refractory period paradigm. On each trial, participants made speeded responses to both a tone (S1) and a rotated letter (S2), presented with varying stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs). If mental rotation of the stimulus letter can proceed while central mechanisms are busy with S1, then the effect of orient...

We present a new methodology to derive faster composite operations of the form dP + Q, where d is a small integer ≥ 2, for generic ECC scalar multiplications over prime fields. In particular, we present an efficient Doubling-Addition (DA) operation that can be exploited to accelerate most scalar multiplication methods, including multiscalar variants. We also present a new precomputation scheme ...

Cotton fibres are hair-like single-cells that elongate to several centimetres long after their initiation from the ovule epidermis at anthesis. The accumulation of malate, along with K+ and sugars, is thought to play an important role in fibre elongation through osmotic regulation and charge balance. However, there is a lack of evidence for or against such an hypothesis. Phosphoenolpyruvate car...

The role of leaf water relations in controlling cell expansion in leaves of water-stressed maize and barley depends on time scale. Sudden changes in leaf water status, induced by sudden changes in humidity, light and soil salinity, greatly affect leaf elongation rate, but often only transiently. With sufficiently large changes in salinity, leaf elongation rates are persistently reduced. When pl...

GIGANTEA (GI) was originally identified by a late-flowering mutant in Arabidopsis, but subsequently has been shown to act in circadian period determination, light inhibition of hypocotyl elongation, and responses to multiple abiotic stresses, including tolerance to high salt and cold (freezing) temperature. Genetic mapping and analysis of families of heterogeneous inbred lines showed that natur...