In a parity judgment task, the ERPs at parietal electrode sites become more negative as more mental rotation has to be executed. This article provides a review of the empirical evidence regarding this amplitude modulation. More specifically, experiments are reported that validate both the functional relationship between mental rotation and the amplitude modulation as well as the temporal relati...

We investigated whether concurrent processing of a tone (T1) interferes with early sensory-perceptual processing of a visual target (T2) in variants of the psychological refractory period paradigm using the event-related potential (ERP) method and 70-channel electroencephalographic recordings. T1, which required a speeded response, was presented in all trials. In half of the trials, T1 was foll...

M. A. Van Selst, E. Ruthruff, and J. C. Johnston (1999) found that practice dramatically reduced dual-task interference in a Psychological Refractory Period (PRP) paradigm with 1 vocal response and 1 manual response. Results from 3 further experiments using the highly trained participants of M. A. Van Selst et al. (1999) support 4 main conclusions: (a) A processing bottleneck exists even after ...

The apparently deleterious effect of aging on dual-task performance is well established, but there is little agreement about the source of this effect. Studies of the psychological refractory period (PRP) indicate that young adults can flexibly control dual-task performance through task-coordination strategies. Thus, the performance of older adults might differ from young adults because older a...

Why is the human brain fundamentally limited when attempting to execute two tasks at the same time or in close succession? Two classical paradigms, psychological refractory period (PRP) and task switching, have independently approached this issue, making significant advances in our understanding of the architecture of cognition. Yet, there is an apparent contradiction between the conclusions de...

Practice can dramatically reduce dual-task interference, but typically does not eliminate interference entirely. Residual interference after practice is especially large with certain non-preferred modality pairings (e.g., auditory-manual and visual-vocal). Does this residual interference imply the existence of a persistent central-processing bottleneck? To address this question, we transferred ...

In this research, the controversial issue of whether the central bottleneck can be bypassed through task automatization was investigated. To examine this issue, participants received six single-task practice sessions with an auditory-vocal task (low vs. high pitch). We then assessed dual-task performance using the analytically tractable psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm, in which t...

The authors examined the role of online order control in the psychological refractory period (PRP) paradigm. In the first 2 experiments, participants switched between color-letter and letter-color orders so that subtask order was isolated as the only element being switched. The results indicated that order switching impaired the 2 PRP responses and modulated the PRP effect. Importantly, these e...