Temporal dimensions of mental effort in different sports

Conducted 3 experiments with 34 professional athletes using the secondary-task interference procedure to assess the time course of mental effort (i.e., allocation of attentional resources) in different sports. The primary sports were volleyball, 100m-dash, 110m-hurdles and tennis; the secondary task was always to emit, as quickly as possible, a verbal response to an acoustic signal. According to the logic of the secondary-task interference, speed of response to the acoustic signal should be inversely related to the resource demands of the primary task at a given moment. The acoustic signal was presented at different times while Ss were performing to estimate the time course of resource allocation. Results show that allocation of resources varied as a function of (a) the moment in which the acoustic signal was presented; (b) the type of performance; and (c) the degree of performance difficulty

Spatial compatibility effects in different sports

The phenomenon of spatial compatibility demonstrates that spatially congruent (compatible) responses are faster than spatially incongruent (incompatible) responses in reaction time (RT) tasks. The effect was measured in a total of 15 15\u201317 yr old athletes who practiced soccer or volleyball. Ss completed RT tasks on a computer. On some trials, the stimulus and the response key were on the same side; on others, they were not. The compatibility effect was much stronger for volleyball players than for soccer players, possibly due to differences in training method or the preferential use of different effectors in the 2 sports. (French, Spanish, German & Italian abstracts) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved

Control processes explored by the study of closed head injury patients

The authors review several conceptualizations of cognitive control processes and proposes a new method to assess control deficits in closed-head-injury patients. These authors highlight the role of frontal lobe processing for cognitive and, potentially, metacognitive control processes. Topics include: the notion of control; varieties of control functions; closed head injury; task sequencing and coordination; task shifting; and negative priming

Decay of stimulus spatial code in horizontal and vertical Simon tasks

Evidence on the processes underlying the horizontal and vertical Simon effect is still controversial. The present study uses experimental manipulations to selectively delay the stages of response execution, response selection, and stimulus identification in three experiments. A reduction is observed for both horizontal and vertical Simon effects when response execution is delayed by a go-signal presented 400-600 ms post-stimulus onset or when a spatial precue is presented 200-400 ms before the stimulus. When the overlap between stimulus spatial code formation and response selection is prevented by decreasing stimulus discriminability, the horizontal Simon effect decays, but the vertical Simon effect does not change. Activation theories, which propose a decay of the automatically activated response ipsilateral to the stimulus, mainly apply to the horizontal Simon effect. In contrast, translation theories, which propose that the effect occurs when stimulus features are translated into a response code, are more suitable to account for the vertical Simon effect