This study compared the relative importance (i.e., proportion of shared variance) of attentional capacity and processing speed accounts of cognitive aging to predict age differences in episodic and working memory performance. Right-handed adults (n = 100), 18 to 88 years of age, completed measures of attentional capacity (divided attention), processing speed, and episodic and working memory. Th...

An attentional blink (AB) paradigm was used to investigate the attentional resources necessary for visual marking. The results showed that distractors presented inside the AB cannot easily be ignored despite participants anticipating a future target display. This supports the hypothesis that attentional resources are required for visual marking. In addition, probe dots were better detected on b...

How are attentional priorities set when multiple stimuli compete for access to the limited-capacity visual attention system? According to Pylyshyn (1989) and Yantis and Johnson (1990), a small number of visual objects can be preattentively indexed or tagged and thereby accessed more rapidly by a subsequent attentional process (e.g., the traditional "spotlight of attention"). In the present stud...

It is widely believed that semantic activation from print is not capacity limited (i.e., that it does not need attentional resources). Prior research has tested this assumption by examining the Stroop effect in the context of the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. These studies yielded additivity of the Stroop effect and SOA on RT, consistent with the hypothesis that semantic activ...

PURPOSE To examine whether semantic access by speech requires attention in children. METHOD Children (N = 200) named pictures and ignored distractors on a cross-modal (distractors: auditory-no face) or multimodal (distractors: auditory-static face and audiovisual-dynamic face) picture word task. The cross-modal task had a low load, and the multimodal task had a high load (i.e., respectively n...

How does the efficiency of attentional selection depend on the number of attended objects in a display? We measured the channel capacity (CC) of human observers during the attentional tracking of moving targets. The relation between CC and target number was used to estimate target-sampling rate. The sampling rate was halved when the number of targets was doubled, indicating that tracking was ac...

The effects of perceptual load on the level of adaptation to task-irrelevant and invisible oriented gratings were examined. Participants performed a task at fixation under conditions of low (detecting color targets) or high (detecting conjunctions of color and shape) perceptual load. Simultaneously, a task-irrelevant-oriented grating was presented monocularly in a more peripheral location but w...

There is currently no consensus on whether the difference between field-dependent and field-independent subjects on tasks of cognitive abilities result from different mental processing strategies, from true group differences in cognitive ability, or from both. School-age children (N = 239) were tested for field dependence/independence using the Children's Embedded Figures Test and for mental-at...