Cognitive Processing最新文献

Evidence has shown that women experience increased cognitive failures in midlife. At the same time, changes in personality traits may occur with increasing age. This study determines which Big Five personality traits mediate age-related cognitive failures in females. We have adhered to the guidelines of the STROBE Checklist in presenting this research. A total of 215 women participated in the study. The participants were assigned to Early Adults (20-29 years old), Early Middle-Aged Adults(30-39 years of age), or Late Middle-Aged Adults (40-55 years old) groups, and completed the Revised NEO Personality Inventory and Cognitive Failures Questionnaire. Mediation analysis implied that conscientiousness negatively mediated the relationship between age and cognitive failures. This means that with increasing age, higher conscientiousness is associated with fewer cognitive failures. Understanding the role of Big Five personality traits as a mediating factor in the age-cognitive failures relationship could have important implications for interventions aimed at supporting women's cognitive health, well-being, and longevity.

The power-space associations are widely discussed in the field of concept representations, with two coding systems proposed to explain this phenomenon: the verbal-spatial and visuospatial codes. However, it remains unclear whether these two coding systems are always activated in all situations, or whether they are context-dependent. To address these problems, the current study adopted two different explicit power judgment tasks, one visual and one verbal. In the visual task, all verbal cues were ruled out, and in the verbal task, all visual cues were ruled out. Each task was coupled with a secondary task-either visuospatial or verbal-spatial-to investigate the underlying activation mechanism. The results showed that both coding systems were sufficient to generate such associations separately. Most importantly, the activation of two different codes was context-dependent and interfered by the related secondary tasks.

Previous studies have identified different outcomes in the cognitive processing of tools but have overlooked the role of the activation level of object affordances. To address this issue, the present study conducted four behavioral experiments. Experiment 1 employed a color judgment task under low affordance activation and revealed a significant tip-dominance effect, with faster responses in stimulus-response incompatible than compatible conditions (t (29) = 3.35, p = 0.002, d = 0.61). In Experiment 2, we increased affordance activation by using typical color but observed no significant compatibility effects (all ps > 0.05). Experiment 3 adopted a Go/NoGo paradigm and introduced semantic attributes, yielding a significant stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) effect (F (1, 27) = 9.22, p = 0.005, η²_p = 0.25). Experiment 4, focusing on atypical colors, showed a reversed compatibility effect for power-grasp tools (t (29) = 3.19, p = 0.003, d = 0.58), but not for precision-grasp tools. Together, these findings indicate that (1) the activation level of object affordances modulates tool-related cognitive processing; (2) low activation leads to dominance of functional-end responses, whereas higher activation elicits SRC effects; and (3) both perceptual and semantic attributes contribute to affordance activation, with semantic effects emerging only when perceptual attributes are present.

How do our prior beliefs influence our judgments (if at all)? This study uses an expectation-inducing task to assess the influence of prior expectations on efficacy judgments in an illusion of control task. The study was conducted online with 150 psychology undergraduate students. The experiment used a between-subjects design. Participants were assigned to one of two groups, with each group being exposed to either a low or high level of expected efficacy. Following the expectation-inducing task, participants performed a standard associative learning task often used to assess the illusion of control. Interestingly, the effect of group assignments influenced the contingency judgments provided by the participants in the standard task both directly and indirectly through impact on their behavior. Although the indirect effect had been reported in previous illusion of control research, the direct effect of expectations in contingency judgments using casual mediation assessments is a novel result.

Mind wandering can interfere with cognitive functions like working memory and reading comprehension. Research shows that mind wandering can lead to perseverative cognition, which can have negative effects on mental health. Previous findings have suggested that sleep disturbance may lead to mind wandering. The present study further investigated the relationship between sleep disturbance and mind wandering, with the mediating role of executive functions (self-organization/problem-solving, self-restraint/inhibition), using the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, Barkley Deficits in Executive Functioning Scale, and Mind Wandering Questionnaire (n = 227). The results of Structural Equation Modelling indicated that the total effect (p = 0.001) and direct effect (p = 0.006) of sleep disturbance and mind wandering were significant, but the indirect effect (p = 0.536) was not significant; therefore, executive function did not mediate the relationship between sleep disturbance and mind wandering. This finding highlights the importance of addressing sleep disturbance in efforts to reduce maladaptive mind wandering.