Researchers have postulated that deficits in cognitive control are associated with, and thus may underlie, the perseverative thinking that characterises generalised anxiety disorder. We examined associations between cognitive control and levels of spontaneous state rumination following a stressor in a sample of healthy control participants and participants with GAD. We assessed cognitive control by measuring working memory capacity, defined as the ability to maintain task-relevant information by ignoring task-irrelevant information. To this end, we used an affective version of the reading (...) span task with valenced distractors. Lower WMC in the presence of negative distractors was associated with greater state rumination in the GAD group, but not in the CTL group. These findings suggest that difficulty maintaining task-relevant information due to interference from negative distractors contributes to perseverative thinking in GAD. (shrink)

To investigate the underlying mechanism of the relationship between visual working memory (VWM) and Chinese character recognition, and the moderation effect of processing efficiency on this relationship, 154 first-grade students were administered a battery of tasks for VWM, rapid temporal processing, and Chinese character reading. In the VWM task, the children were asked to remember the jumping routes of a frog and report these routes in reverse sequence. The longest span for which each participant could respond correctly at least four (...) times out of six was the VWM index. In the task of temporal order judgement, the participants were asked to select which of two balls was presented first, with stimulus onset asynchronies varying from 8 to 492 ms according to an adaptive psychophysical procedure. Visual temporal order threshold (VTOT) was utilized as an indicator of processing efficiency. The participants were asked to read 100 characters aloud to measure their word-level reading abilities in Chinese character recognition. After controlling age, non-verbal intelligence, visual short-term memory, morphological awareness, and orthographic awareness, the results of a moderation effect analysis showed that (1) both VWM and visual VTOT predicted Chinese character reading, and (2) the moderation effect of VTOT on the VWM-reading link was significant ( p = 0.001). The correlation between VWM and Chinese character reading was positive and significant when VTOTs were above average (i.e., smaller than 87.14 ms); however, the correlation was negative at relatively poor levels of VTOTs (i.e., larger than 231.44 ms). (shrink)

Visual working memory is a construct hypothesized to store a small amount of accurate perceptual information that can be brought to bear on a task. Much research concerns the construct's capacity and the precision of the information stored. Two prominent theories of VWM representation have emerged: slot-based and continuous-resource mechanisms. Prior modeling work suggests that a continuous resource that varies over trials with variable capacity and a potential to make localization errors best accounts for the empirical data. Questions remain regarding (...) the variability in VWM capacity and precision. Using a novel eye-tracking paradigm, we demonstrate that VWM facilitates search and exhibits effects of fixation frequency and recency, particularly for prior targets. Whereas slot-based memory models cannot account for the human data, a novel continuous-resource model does capture the behavioral and eye tracking data, and identifies the relevant resource as item activation. (shrink)

Mindfulness has come to be considered an important approach to help individuals cultivate transformative capacity to free themselves from stress and suffering. However, the transformative potential of mindfulness extends beyond individual stress management. This study contributes to a broadening of the scope of contemplative science by integrating the prominent, individually focused mindfulness meditation literature with collective mindfulness scholarship. In so doing, it aims to illuminate an important context in which mindfulness interventions are increasingly prevalent: workplaces. Typically, the intended effect of (...) workplace mindfulness training is to help workers manage stress better. Since mindfulness in organizations impacts individual and collective processes, the study blends the above literatures to create a cross-level “next-generation” Team Mindfulness Training pilot. Its potential in helping individuals and teams to manage work stress better is investigated via a two-phase mixed-methods research study in high-stress military work populations, and compared to a conventional 8-week mindfulness meditation program based on mindfulness-based stress reduction. Results suggest that compared to the “first-generation” mindfulness program, TMT seems no less effective in raising individual stress management skills, and may hold more promise in generating collective capacity to manage stress and unexpected difficulty, linked to an apparent interdependence between collective and individual mindfulness capacity development. Based on these empirical results, the study contributes to theory in three important ways: first, it outlines how individual and collective mindfulness in workplaces may be interdependent. Second, it explains why “next-generation” workplace training interventions should apply a cross-level approach. And third, it illustrates how its transformative potential for people at work, individually as well as collectively, can be extended by moving beyond an inward-looking meditation focus in mindfulness training. The study contributes to practice by providing a detailed outline of the pilot TMT program, and offers a series of follow-up research opportunities to inspire further scientific innovation in workplace mindfulness training, especially for high-stress work populations. The study’s ultimate aim is to prompt a shift away from adapting clinically oriented, self-focused “first-generation” mindfulness training protocols, and towards mindfulness as team sport: a more prosocially oriented mindfulness science intent on generating wisdom and compassion, for one and all. (shrink)

The ability to reason and problem‐solve in novel situations, as measured by the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices (RAPM), is highly predictive of both cognitive task performance and real‐world outcomes. Here we provide evidence that RAPM performance depends on the ability to reallocate attention in response to self‐generated feedback about progress. We propose that such an ability is underpinned by the basal ganglia nuclei, which are critically tied to both reward processing and cognitive control. This hypothesis was implemented in a neurocomputational (...) model of the RAPM task, which was used to derive novel predictions at the behavioral and neural levels. These predictions were then verified in one neuroimaging and two behavioral experiments. Furthermore, an effective connectivity analysis of the neuroimaging data confirmed a role for the basal ganglia in modulating attention. Taken together, these results suggest that individual differences in a neural circuit related to reward processing underpin human fluid reasoning abilities. (shrink)

Working memory (WM) is a cognitive system that allows us to select, organise, and integrate perceptual information with memories and current goal-directed intentions. As such, this system is central to day-to-day functioning and would be expected to be especially important in decision making and problem solving. We hypothesised that to the extent that individuals differ in WM capacity they would also be differentially vulnerable to the experience of depression and anxiety. Undergraduate students completed a computerised change detection task in which (...) storage capacity and filtering efficiency measures were obtained. It was found that low WM storage and poor filtering efficiency interacted to predict higher levels of emotional distress as measured by self-reported depressive symptoms, ruminative coping, and state anxiety. It was suggested that low capacity and a poor ability to ignore task-irrelevant information may lead to poorer problem solving, more extreme judgements of oneself and circumstances, increased rumination, and poorer emotional regulation. (shrink)

Natural myside bias is the tendency to evaluate propositions from within one's own perspective when given no instructions or cues (such as within-participants conditions) to avoid doing so. We defined the participant's perspective as their previously existing status on four variables: their sex, whether they smoked, their alcohol consumption, and the strength of their religious beliefs. Participants then evaluated a contentious but ultimately factual proposition relevant to each of these demographic factors. Myside bias is defined between-participants as the mean difference (...) in the evaluation of the proposition between groups with differing prior status on the variable. Whether an individual difference variable (such as cognitive ability) is related to the magnitude of the myside bias is indicated by whether the individual difference variable interacts with the between-participants status variable. In two experiments involving a total of over 1400 university students ( n = 1484) and eight different comparisons, we found very little evidence that participants of higher cognitive ability displayed less natural myside bias. The degree of myside bias was also relatively independent of individual differences in thinking dispositions. We speculate that ideas from memetic theory and dual-process theory might help to explain why natural myside bias is quite dissociated from individual difference variables. (shrink)

In this response, we clarify several misunderstandings of the understanding/acceptance principle and defend our specific operationalization of that principle. We reiterate the importance of addressing the problem of rational task construal and we elaborate the notion of computational limitations contained in our target article. Our concept of thinking dispositions as variable intentional-level styles of epistemic and behavioral regulation is explained, as is its relation to the rationality debate. Many of the suggestions of the commentators for elaborating two-process models are easily (...) integrated into our generic dual-process account. We further explicate how we view the relation between System 1 and System 2 and evolutionary and normative rationality. We clarify our attempt to fuse the contributions of the cognitive ecologists with the insights of the original heuristics and biases researchers. (shrink)

In sentences such as “Some dogs are mammals,” the literal semantic meaning (“Some and possibly all dogs are mammals”) conflicts with the pragmatic meaning (“Not all dogs are mammals,” known as a scalar implicature). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the semantic or pragmatic meaning of such utterances, yet the underlying reason for this variation is unknown. Drawing on theoretical models of scalar implicature derivation, we explore the hypothesis that the cognitive (...) abilities of executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) contribute to this observed variation. In Experiment 1, we show that individuals with better ToM are more likely to compute a scalar implicature and adopt the pragmatic meaning of an utterance; however, EF makes no unique contribution to scalar implicature comprehension after accounting for ToM. In Experiment 2, we replicate this finding and assess whether it generalizes to the comprehension of other pragmatic phenomena such as indirect requests (e.g., “It's hot in here” uttered to ask for something to be done) and metaphor (e.g., “to harvest courage”). This is the first evidence that differences in ToM are associated with pragmatic competence in neurotypical adults across distinct pragmatic phenomena. (shrink)

Two types of truth table task are used to examine people's mental representation of conditionals. In two within-participants experiments, participants either receive the same task-type twice (Experiment 1) or are presented successively with both a possibilities task and a truth task (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 examines how people interpret the three-option possibilities task and whether they have a clear understanding of it. The present study aims to examine, for both task-types, how participants' cognitive ability relates to the classification of the (...) truth table cases as irrelevant, and their consistency in doing so. Looking at the answer patterns, participants' cognitive ability influences their classification of the truth table cases: A positive correlation exists between cognitive ability and the number of false-antecedent cases classified as ?irrelevant?, both in the possibilities task and the truth task. This favours a suppositional representation of conditionals. (shrink)

We predicted that short-term training of executive control would improve both cognitive control itself and general fluid intelligence. We randomly assigned 120 high school students to the experimental and control groups. The former underwent a 14-day training of four executive functions: interference resolution, response inhibition, task switching, and goal monitoring. The latter did not train anything. The training significantly improved cognitive control and IQ. The control group also improved their IQ scores but gained less than the experimental one. However, the (...) amount of IQ scores enhancement did not correlate with the majority of indices of the training effectiveness, thus justifying the supposition that such enhancement resulted from the general effect of participation in the training rather than from the improvement of executive functions underlying Gf. (shrink)

Prior research indicates that time perspective (TP; views of past, present and future) is related to decision making style. By contrast, no prior study considered relations between time perspective and decision-making competence. We therefore investigated associations between dimensions of the Swedish Zimbardo Time Perspective Inventory (S-ZTPI) and performance on the Adult Decision-Making Competence (A-DMC) battery in a sample of older adults (60-90 years, N = 346). A structural equation model involving four A-DMC components as indicators of a general DMC factor (...) and the six TP dimensions as the predictors revealed a significant negative association between the Present Fatalistic dimension and DMC. Given that age-related differences were apparent in DMC and that Present Fatalistic orientation increased with age, we tested a model by which the age-related differences in DMC were mediated by age-related differences in Present Fatalistic attitudes and in working memory. The results were consistent with full mediation of the age effects, with Present Fatalistic and working memory jointly accounting for a substantial amount of the variance in DMC (51%). The finding that DMC among older adults, in particular more cognitively demanding aspects such as applying decision rules, can be undermined by increased present fatalistic attitudes and declines in working memory is discussed in terms of theoretical frameworks highlighting the contribution of both motivational and cognitive factors to effective decision making. (shrink)

Making recognition decisions often requires us to reference the contents of working memory, the information available for ongoing cognitive processing. As such, understanding how recognition decisions are made when based on the contents of working memory is of critical importance. In this work we examine whether recognition decisions based on the contents of visual working memory follow a continuous decision process of graded information about the correct choice or a discrete decision process reflecting only knowing and guessing. We find a (...) clear pattern in favor of a continuous latent strength model of visual working memory–based decision making, supporting the notion that visual recognition decision processes are impacted by the degree of matching between the contents of working memory and the choices given. Relation to relevant findings and the implications for human information processing more generally are discussed. (shrink)

The evolution from pre-human primates to modern Homo sapiens is a complex one involving many domains, ranging from the material to the social to the cognitive, both at the individual and the community levels. This article focuses on a critical qualitative transition that took place during this evolution involving both the social and the cognitive domains. For the social domain, the transition is from the face-to-face forms of social interaction and organization that characterize the non-human primates that reached, with Pan, (...) a hiatus due to the centripetal effects that highly individualized behavior has on a social system. The transition is to the relation-based forms of social organization that evolved in the hominins ancestral to Homo sapiens and are universal in human societies today. For the cognitive domain, this transition involves going from behavior responding mainly to phenomenal level sensory inputs to behavior formed in accordance with the concept of a relation, initially abstracted from behavior patterns, then extending the concept of a relation beyond abstraction from behavior patterns to the concept of a relation generated recursively through constructing the relation of a relation. This extension made possible the construction of systems of relations; initially genealogical systems of relations constructed culturally using the logic of recursion, and subsequently, the symbolic, computational systems of kin term relations referred to by anthropologists as kinship terminologies. The latter are “constructed realities” in the sense this term is used by cultural anthropologists. It follows that the evolution of relation-based systems of social interaction is not adequately accounted for through population model evolutionary accounts such as the Dual Inheritance Theory of human evolution since “constructed realities” constitute collectively and publicly shared cultural knowledge rather than the individually and privately possessed knowledge that is assumed in the population model framework for human evolution. (shrink)

A novel problem or task may seem difficult at first, but with enough practice, it can become easy and routine. Practice and the process of learning is often accompanied by some mild cognitive uneas...