Goal-directed behavior requires the cognitive system to distinguish between relevant and irrelevant information. The authors show that task sets help to shield the system from irrelevant information. Participants had to respond to eight different colored word stimuli under different instruction conditions. They either had to learn the stimulus-response mappings (SR condition), to use one task s...

Performance in a dual task is typically worse than performance in a single task due to the sharing of limited cognitive capacity. The present study found the opposite results when the task involved postural control in non-typical standing. Thirtysix children aged 4-9 years stood on a force plate for 10 seconds with a normal or heel-to-toe stance. In the dual-task condition, they also performed ...

A credible theory of intelligence must provide a satisfactory account of the wide spectrum of learning abilities displayed by humans and some other animals. One of the most impressive of these is skill acquisition—the ability to create new skills, refine them through practice, and apply them in new task contexts. This ability to retain and refine solutions to important subproblems and then empl...

The simultaneous consideration of various notions (practice, procedure, prescribed task, effective task, task space, task search, task, method, activity) shows that the task accomplishment cannot be discussed at a general level, as classical approaches do. Rather, this paper points out the importance to distinguish the task definition and the task realization because the former is mainly static...

A visual-visual dual computer task was designed to test the effect of the thermal environment on dual task performance. The temperatures selected for testing were 20 and 35 degrees C Wet Bulb Globe Temperature (WBGT). 34 volunteers were randomly assigned to 1 of the 2 temperature conditions. Individual differences in single task performance were controlled by equating the baselines of single ta...

The notion of a compensation is widely used in advanced transaction models as means of recovery from a failure. Similar concepts are adopted for providing “transaction-like” behavior for long business processes supported by workflows technology. Generally, designing a compensating task in the context of a workflow process is a non-trivial job. In fact, not every task is compensatable. This work...