Two experiments examined the relations among adult aging, mind wandering, and executive-task performance, following from surprising laboratory findings that older adults report fewer task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) than do younger adults (e.g., Giambra, 1989; Jackson & Balota, 2012). Because older adults may experience more ability- and performance-related worry during cognitive tasks in the lab...

BACKGROUND Neuropsychological instruments to assess cognitive trajectories during childhood in epidemiological studies are needed. This would improve neurodevelopment characterization in order to identify its potential determinants. We aimed to study whether repeated measures of n-back, a working memory task, detect developmental trajectories in schoolchildren during a 1-year follow-up. METHO...

Working memory (WM) performance declines with age. However, several studies have shown that WM training may lead to performance increases not only in the trained task, but also in untrained cognitive transfer tasks. It has been suggested that transfer effects occur if training task and transfer task share specific processing components that are supposedly processed in the same brain areas. In t...

CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome) is commonly co-morbid with POTS (postural tachycardia syndrome). Individuals with CFS/POTS experience unrelenting fatigue, tachycardia during orthostatic stress and ill-defined neurocognitive impairment, often described as 'mental fog'. We hypothesized that orthostatic stress causes neurocognitive impairment in CFS/POTS related to decreased CBFV (cerebral blood fl...

Sleep clearly influences learning and memory since sleep deprivation and stress impairs both cognitive processes. Working memory is an essential cognitive process and refers to a short-term holding of incoming information required to update the long-term mnemonic storage and to manipulate new elements in order to solve problems and make decisions. Nevertheless, the influence of sleep deprivatio...

The spatial-verbal dichotomy of working memory tasks was investigated using event-related potentials. Using an n-back task with three levels of n (0-, 1-, and 2-back), participants either matched words presented at a fixed screen position (verbal task) or matched the locations of non-word symbols presented at various positions across the screen (spatial task). Therefore, these two conditions we...

Alzheimer's dementia (AD) is the most common dementia, Background accounting for more than 60% of all dementia cases. For adults aged >65 years, the incidence rate doubles for every 5 years of increased age; therefore, preserving cognitive function is a pressing issue. Thus, our team screens for AD in older adults with mild cognitive impairment, at 11 public halls in Kashihara City, Japan, and ...

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Two studies aiming to investigate the use of cognitive control strategies in the N-Back task are presented. The first study identified a behavioral effect that seemed indicative of participants’ proneness toward using highversus low-control strategies. Two ACT-R models of N-Back implementing the two hypothesized strategies were developed. Model simulations were used to identify the proneness to...