52 research outputs found
Does Speaking Two Dialects in Daily Life Affect Executive Functions? An Event-Related Potential Study
Whether using two languages enhances executive functions is a matter of debate. Here, we
take a novel perspective to examine the bilingual advantage hypothesis by comparing bidialect
with mono-dialect speakers’ performance on a non-linguistic task that requires executive
control. Two groups of native Chinese speakers, one speaking only the standard Chinese
Mandarin and the other also speaking the Southern-Min dialect, which differs from the
standard Chinese Mandarin primarily in phonology, performed a classic Flanker task. Behavioural
results showed no difference between the two groups, but event-related potentials
recorded simultaneously revealed a number of differences, including an earlier P2 effect in
the bi-dialect as compared to the mono-dialect group, suggesting that the two groups
engage different underlying neural processes. Despite differences in the early ERP component,
no between-group differences in the magnitude of the Flanker effects, which is an
index of conflict resolution, were observed in the N2 component. Therefore, these findings
suggest that speaking two dialects of one language does not enhance executive functions.
Implications of the current findings for the bilingual advantage hypothesis are discussed
On the costs and benefits of repeating a nonspatial feature in an exogenous spatial cuing paradigm
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Spatial constancy of attention across eye movements is mediated by the presence of visual objects
Recent studies have shown that attentional facilitation lingers at the retinotopic coordinates of a previously attended position after an eye movement. These results are intriguing, because the retinotopic location becomes behaviorally irrelevant once the eyes have moved. Critically, in these studies participants were asked to maintain attention on a blank location of the screen. In the present study, we examined whether the continuing presence of a visual object at the cued location could affect the allocation of attention across eye movements. We used a trans-saccadic cueing paradigm in which the relevant positions could be defined or not by visual objects (simple square outlines). We find an attentional benefit at the spatiotopic location of the cue only when the object (the placeholder) has been continuously present at that location. We conclude that the presence of an object at the attended location is a critical factor for the maintenance of spatial constancy of attention across eye movements, a finding that helps to reconcile previous conflicting results
Peripheral stimuli generate different forms of inhibition of return when participants make prosaccades versus antisaccades to them
Feature integration in basic detection and localization tasks: Insights from the attentional orienting literature
The effects of ignored versus foveated cues upon inhibition of return: An event-related potential study
Sensory adaptation and inhibition of return: dissociating multiple inhibitory cueing effects
Selective and nonselective inhibition of competitors in picture naming
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121634.pdf (publisher's version ) (Open Access)The present study examined the relation between nonselective inhibition and selective inhibition in picture naming performance. Nonselective inhibition refers to the ability to suppress any unwanted response, whereas selective inhibition refers to the ability to suppress specific competing responses. The degree of competition in picture naming was manipulated by presenting targets along with distractor words that could be semantically related (e.g., a picture of a dog combined with the word cat) or unrelated (tree) to the picture name. The mean naming response time (RT) was longer in the related than in the unrelated condition, reflecting semantic interference. Delta plot analyses showed that participants with small mean semantic interference effects employed selective inhibition more effectively than did participants with larger semantic interference effects. The participants were also tested on the stop-signal task, which taps nonselective inhibition. Their performance on this task was correlated with their mean naming RT but, importantly, not with the selective inhibition indexed by the delta plot analyses and the magnitude of the semantic interference effect. These results indicate that nonselective inhibition ability and selective inhibition of competitors in picture naming are separable to some extent
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