Storage interference in working memory cannot be removed by attention

Data analytics-driven solutions are widely used in various intelligent systems, where humans and machines make decisions collaboratively based on predictions. Human factors such as personality and trust have significant effects on such human–machine collaborations. This paper investigates effects of personality traits on user trust in human–machine collaborations under uncertainty and cognitive load conditions. A user study of 42 subjects in a repeated factorial design experiment found that uncertainty presentation led to increased trust but only under low cognitive load conditions when users had sufficient cognitive resources to process the information. Presentation of uncertainty under high load conditions led to a decrease in trust. When further drilling down into personality trait groups of users, overall, users with low Openness showed the highest trust. Furthermore, under the low cognitive load condition, it was found that the trust was enhanced under ambiguity uncertainty with low Agreeableness, low Neuroticism, high Extraversion, high Conscientiousness, and high Openness. Under the high cognitive load condition, high Neuroticism and low Extraversion benefitted the trust without the uncertainty presentation. The results demonstrated that different personality traits affected trust differently under uncertainty and cognitive load conditions. A framework of user trust feedback loop was set up to incorporate the study results into human–machine collaborations for the meaningful participatory design.

The objective of this cross-sectional study was to determine the neural signature of dual-tasking deficits in idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder using a validated gait paradigm. Fifty-eight participants (28 controls; 30 idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder patients) were recruited; 52 participants had functional MRI scans as they performed a validated dual-task virtual reality gait paradigm using foot pedals. Forty-one participants completed single- and dual-task "overground walking" on a pressure sensor carpet. Idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder patients showed deficits in dual-tasking (i.e., greater mean step time) compared to controls during "overground walking." Functional MRI revealed that idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder patients had reduced blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal change in the dorsal caudate nucleus, and significantly different corticostriatal functional connectivity patterns from controls, when dual-tasking in high versus low cognitive load. While controls showed greater connectivity between frontoparietal and motor networks, idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder patients exhibited less change in this connectivity as a function of cognitive load. These findings demonstrate evidence of dual-task gait deficits in idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder patients, underpinned by disrupted corticostriatal connectivity. Minimal differences in the level of functional connectivity between dual-tasking conditions of high and low cognitive load suggest that idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder patients recruit cognitive networks to control gait even when the cognitive demands are low. This may indicate a compensatory strategy for early cognitive decline in idiopathic rapid eye movement sleep behavior disorder. © 2020 International Parkinson and Movement Disorder Society.

Research has shown that people prefer the letters in their names to letters that are not in their names. This name-letter effect seems to influence important life decision such as where one chooses to live or whom one chooses to marry. The authors' laboratory study investigated whether this effect generalizes to individuals' job-choice intentions under specific conditions. Furthermore, the authors hypothesized that name-letter preferences in job-choice intentions would be stronger under conditions of high cognitive load than under conditions of low cognitive load. Two experiments with final-year students attending a university in Belgium showed support for name-letter preferences in job-choice intentions. There was no support for the hypothesized moderating role of cognitive load. The authors discuss the implications of these results for theory and research on name-letter preferences and job choice.

Childhood emotional maltreatment, anxiety, attachment, and mindfulness: Associations with facial emotion recognition

Pupillometric and saccadic measures of affective and executive processing in anxiety

Cathodal tDCS improves task performance in participants high in Coldheartedness.

This research examined whether increased cognitive task loading decreases warning compliance behavior. Participants performed a task in which they installed an external disk drive to a computer. Inside the accompanying owner's manual were a set of specific procedures that were to be followed during the installation to avoid damaging the equipment (i.e., to turn off the computer, to touch the computer's rear metal connector to discharge static electricity, and to eject a transport disk from the disk drive). Concurrent with this task, participants in the low and high task load conditions had to speak the answers to a series of single-digit or double-digit addition problems that were presented by a tape player. A control condition lacked the addition task. The results showed reduced compliance to the discharge static electricity instruction in the high load condition compared to the no load condition. The low load condition produced intermediate compliance, but was not significantly different from the other two conditions with one exception: the high load condition produced significantly lower compliance for the discharge static electricity instruction than the low load condition. These results suggest that warning effectiveness can be reduced when the mental resources necessary to carry out compliance are being absorbed by other concurrently performed tasks. Implications for further research on task loading and warning compliance are described.

Although interface consistency is theorized to increase performance and user satisfaction, previous research has found mixed and often non-significant results. By controlling for the level of task difficulty, specifically the cognitive load, it is hoped that the study will explain the contradictory findings of past research. Eighty participants will be used in a 2×2×2 between-subjects factorial design. The study will manipulate the level of interface consistency, along with intrinsic and extraneous cognitive load imposed by the task. Objective performance measures of task completion time and error-rate along with the subjective measure of user satisfaction will be analyzed. It is expected that the high interface consistency condition will perform better than low interface consistency; in contrast, it is predicted that the low cognitive load condition will outperform the high cognitive load condition. Furthermore, it is predicted that the effect of consistency and cognitive load will interact causing the lack of interface consistency to be significantly more detrimental when paired with a high level of either form of cognitive load.

Cognitive Load Theory describes the concept of limited working memory capacity for information processing and cognitive tasks requiring mental effort. Cognitive load is affected by the difficulty levels involved in the learning process and mental tasks. The present meta-analysis examines the effect of difficulty levels in educational tasks based on cognitive load using fixation duration, number of fixations, and pupil dilation. The present study is based on 21 articles containing 34 comparisons between high and low cognitive load conditions in education settings. We evaluated Cohen's d for effect size, the I 2 statistic and Q-test to estimate heterogeneity, and Egger's regression test for publication bias. The heterogeneity of the experimental settings was relatively high, nevertheless, we observed meaningful differences in pupil metrics. Pupil dilation significantly increased in hard compared to easy task conditions ( d = 0.72, CI = 0.3672; 1.072, p -value < 0.0001), serving as an indicator of cognitive load level in various educational settings. Fixation duration and number of fixations did not differentiate between the easy and hard levels.

The ability to focus on a task while disregarding irrelevant information is an example of selective attention. The perceptual-load hypothesis argues that the occurrence of early or late selection mechanisms is determined by task-relevant perceptual load. Additionally, evidence shows that pupil size serves as proxy of locus coeruleus-norepinephrine (LC-NE) activity, a system associated with cognitive and attentional mediation. Here, we assessed pupil baseline (and pupil dilation) as predictors of load-related early and late selection performance. Participants were asked to search for a target in conditions of high and low perceptual load, while ignoring irrelevant stimuli. The results showed that pupil baseline size, measured prior trial onset, significantly predicted the upcoming search efficiency only in low perceptual load, when—according to the perceptual-load hypothesis—all perceptual information receives attentional resources. In addition, pupil dilation was linked to the time course of perceptual processing and predicted response times in both perceptual load conditions, an association that was enhanced in high load. Thus, this study relates attentional selection mechanisms, as defined by the perceptual-load theory, with pupil-related LC-NE activity. Because pupil baseline predicted attentional performance in low load but not in high load, this suggests that different attentional mechanisms are involved, one in which the LC-NE system plays a key role (low load) and one in which it is less relevant (high load). This suggests that the degree with which LC-NE influences behavioral performance is related to the perceptual load of the task at hand.

Application of methanol and optimization of mixture design over the full operating map in an intelligent charge compression ignition (ICCI) engine

Prepulse inhibition (PPI) is an automatic and pre-attentive sensorimotor gating process. Several studies have shown that advanced cognitive functions can modulate PPI. This study aimed to further elucidate the modulatory effect of attentional resource allocation on PPI. We examined the differences in PPI between high and low attentional loads. First, we verified that the adapted feature versus combination visual search paradigm could produce high and low perceptual load differences according to the task demands. Second, we measured the participants' task-unrelated PPI during the visual search task and found that the PPI in the high-load condition was significantly lower than that in the low-load condition. To further elucidate the role of attentional resources, we tested task-related PPI using a dual-task paradigm in which participants were instructed to complete a visual task with an auditory discrimination task. We found a result similar to that of the task-unrelated experiment. The participants in the high-load condition had less PPI than those in the low-load condition. Finally, we ruled out the possibility that the working memory load explains the modulation of PPI. In line with the theory of PPI modulation, these results suggest that allocating limited attentional resources to the prepulse modulates PPI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

In the present study, penetration and evaporation of the diesel sprays injected by a group of two closely spaced orifices (a group-hole nozzle) were investigated and compared with those of conventional single-hole nozzle sprays under various engine loads and wall-impinging conditions of direct-injection (DI) diesel engines. Both free and wall-impinging conditions were considered. The experiments were performed inside a constant-volume vessel under simulated ambient conditions for low and high engine loads of DI diesel engines. To investigate the effect of spray targeting, two impinging conditions (impingement angles of 45° and 90° with the same impingement distance) were applied. Geometry and liquid/vapour mass distributions of the evaporating diesel sprays were analysed using a laser absorption scattering (LAS) technique. Under a free spray condition, fuel evaporation of the group-hole nozzle spray was improved compared with that of the single-hole nozzle spray at low load conditions, while it showed simultaneous deterioration in fuel evaporation and spray tip penetration at high load conditions. Jet axes deflection of the two jets from the group-hole nozzle, which generated a dense liquid region at the central region of the spray, was responsible for this deteriorated evaporation at high load conditions. Under a vertical impingement condition (impingement angle of 90°), the group-hole nozzle spray showed simultaneous improvement in spray tip penetration and fuel evaporation at both low and high load conditions from strong momentum interaction of the two jets on the impingement wall. However, this improvement from the group-hole nozzle did not appear at an inclined wall-impingement condition (impingement angle of 45°) owing to weakened and delayed momentum interaction of the two jets. Both spray tip penetration and fuel evaporation of the group-hole nozzle spray were deteriorated at the inclined wall-impinging condition.

Recent studies have shown that spontaneous pre-stimulus fluctuations in brain activity affect higher-order cognitive processes, including risky decision-making, cognitive flexibility, and aesthetic judgments. However, there is currently no direct evidence to suggest that pre-choice activity influences value-based decisions that require self-control. We examined the impact of fluctuations in pre-choice activity in key regions of the reward system on self-control in food choice. In the functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) scanner, 49 participants made 120 food choices that required self-control in high and low working memory load conditions. The task was designed to ensure that participants were cognitively engaged and not thinking about upcoming choices. We defined self-control success as choosing a food item that was healthier over one that was tastier. The brain regions of interest (ROIs) were the ventral tegmental area (VTA), putamen, nucleus accumbens (NAc), and caudate nucleus. For each participant and condition, we calculated the mean activity in the 3-s interval preceding the presentation of food stimuli in successful and failed self-control trials. These activities were then used as predictors of self-control success in a fixed-effects logistic regression model. The results indicate that increased pre-choice VTA activity was linked to a higher probability of self-control success in a subsequent food-choice task within the low-load condition, but not in the high-load condition. We posit that pre-choice fluctuations in VTA activity change the reference point for immediate (taste) reward evaluation, which may explain our finding. This suggests that the neural context of decisions may be a key factor influencing human behavior.

Implementation intentions ("If I encounter Situation X, then I'll perform Behavior Y!") are postulated to instigate automatic action initiation. In 4 studies, the hypothesis was tested that implementation intentions lead to immediate action initiation once the specified situation is encountered, even under conditions of high cognitive load. First, individuals whose action control is known to be hampered by disruptive cognitive business, such as opiate addicts under withdrawal (Study 1) and schizophrenic patients (Study 2), benefited from forming implementation intentions. Second, the beneficial effect of implementation intentions was also found in 2 experiments with university students (Studies 3 and 4) in which cognitive load was experimentally induced by using dual task paradigms. Results of the 4 studies suggest that forming implementation intentions instigates immediate action initiation that is also efficient.