Classification of the Main Economic Costs and Benefits of the EU Enlargement

A classification is offered of the main economic costs and benefits of the EU enlargement for Bulgaria, the Central and Eastern European Countries and the old EU members. The costs and benefits are classified according to the time horizon (short and long term), character (economic, political, social) and beneficiaries (states, social groups, firms, persons). The most significant costs at macro and micro level in the enlarged EU are presented.

Development of the European Integration Process in the Higher Education

The paper presents the development of the European integration process in higher education for a period starting with the beginning of the idea for the launch of the Bologna process (1999) till its end with the launch of the European Higher Education Area (March 2010). The basic problems of the integration process in this field of integration have been analyzed, as well as the institutional structure of the European Higher Education Area, the European solutions of the problems of quality assurance in higher education, as well as a comparative analysis of the institutional structure and the higher education quality assessment criteria in Bulgaria, Romania, Cyprus and Greece.

The set of tools for evaluation of expenses on and benefits from the expansion of the European Union to the East

This paper summarizes the instrumentation system of confirmed and widely used methods in the evaluation of expenses on and benefits from the expansion of the EU to the East. Aspects of general equilibrium models are presented, of macroeconomic models (regressional), of sectorial models, of gravitation models and the methodology of optimal currency zone.

Investigating the shift between externally and internally oriented cognition; a novel task-switching paradigm.

Despite our constant need to flexibly balance internal and external information, research on cognitive flexibility has focused solely on shifts between externally oriented tasks. In contrast, switches across internally oriented processes (and self-referential cognition specifically), and between internal and external domains have never been investigated. Here, we report a novel task-switching paradigm developed to explore the behavioural signatures associated with cognitive flexibility when self-referential, as well as more traditional external processes, are involved. 200 healthy volunteers completed an online task. In each trial, participants performed one of four possible tasks on written words, as instructed by a pre-stimulus cue. These included two externally and two internally oriented tasks: assessing whether the third letter was a consonant, or the penultimate letter was a vowel vs. assessing whether the adjective applied to their personality, or if it described a bodily sensation they were currently experiencing. 40% of trials involved switches to another task and these were equally distributed across within-external, within-internal, internal-to-external and external-to-internal switches. We found higher response times (RT) for switches compared to repetitions both in the external and internal domain, thus demonstrating the presence of switch costs in self-referential tasks for the first time. We also found higher RTs for between-domain switches compared to switches within each domain. We propose that these effects originate from the goal-directed engagement of different domain-specific cognitive systems that flexibly communicate and share domain-general control features

Investigating the shift between externally and internally oriented cognition:a novel task-switching paradigm

Despite our constant need to flexibly balance internal and external information, research on cognitive flexibility has focused solely on shifts between externally oriented tasks. In contrast, switches across internally oriented processes (and self-referential cognition specifically) and between internal and external domains have never been investigated. Here, we report a novel task-switching paradigm developed to explore the behavioural signatures associated with cognitive flexibility when self-referential processes, as well as more traditional external processes, are involved. Two hundred healthy volunteers completed an online task. In each trial, participants performed one of four possible tasks on written words, as instructed by a pre-stimulus cue. These included two externally and two internally oriented tasks: assessing whether the third letter was a consonant or the penultimate letter was a vowel versus assessing whether the adjective applied to their personality or if it described a bodily sensation they were currently experiencing. In total, 40% of trials involved switches to another task, and these were equally distributed across within-external, within-internal, internal-to-external and external-to-internal switches. We found higher response times for switches compared to repetitions both in the external and internal domains, thus demonstrating the presence of switch costs in self-referential tasks for the first time. We also found higher response times for between-domain switches compared to switches within each domain. We propose that these effects originate from the goal-directed engagement of different domain-specific cognitive systems that flexibly communicate and share domain-general control features