We conducted 2 multitasking experiments to examine the finding that first-task reaction times (RTs) are slower in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm than in the prioritized processing (PP) paradigm. To see whether this difference between the 2 paradigms could be explained entirely by differences in first-task preparation, which would be consistent with the standard response sele...

People often have trouble performing 2 relatively simple tasks concurrently. The causes of this interference and its implications for the nature of attentional limitations have been controversial for 40 years, but recent experimental findings are beginning to provide some answers. Studies of the psychological refractory period effect indicate a stubborn bottleneck encompassing the process of ch...

In a previous paper the authors developed a H−BMO theory for unbounded metric measure spaces (M, ρ, μ) of infinite measure that are locally doubling and satisfy two geometric properties, called “approximate midpoint” property and “isoperimetric” property. In this paper we develop a similar theory for spaces of finite measure. We prove that all the results that hold in the infinite measure case ...

Several recent studies have found markedly increased rates of schizophrenia among West Indian immigrants to the UK. Almost exclusively, authors have sought psychosocial explanations for these findings. This paper hypothesises that environmental causes, notably obstetric complications and perinatal infections, provide more plausible aetiological models, especially for the raised rates of schizop...

The present experiment examined the effects of input/output modality pairings on dual-task performance using the psychological refractory period (PRP) procedure. Four groups of participants performed two tasks composed of the same sets of inputs (visual and auditory) and the same sets of outputs (manual and vocal), but with different input/output modality pairings. Whereas modality pairings had...

To get some intuition, we begin with the group of real numbers R under addition. A trivial upper bound for the size of a sum set is |A + A| ≤ |A| 2+|A| 2 (equality is obtained when every pair of elements of A have a distinct sum). If we build A by taking elements of R at random, then we expect |A+A| to be very close to this upper bound, since the probability of a1+a2 = a3+a4 is very small (wher...