Individual differences in susceptibility to interference and general cognitive ability

The role of prefrontal cortex in working-memory capacity, executive attention, and general fluid intelligence: An individual-differences perspective

“…For example, individuals with low WM spans are more susceptible than those with high spans to various forms of LTM interference, such as fan-effect, output, retroactive, and proactive interference (Conway & Engle, 1994;Kane & Engle, 2000;Rosen & Engle, 1997. The same appears to be true for Gf, at least with respect to proactive and output interference (Borkowski, 1965;Dempster & Corkill, 1999;E. Miller, 1984;Phillips, 1997Phillips, , 1999.…”

“…When the color and the word conflict, as in the case of the word RED appearing in green, color naming is slowed (and more error prone) than when the word or word-like stimulus is unrelated to the color (e.g., PIN, or XXX, in green), or when the color and word match (e.g., GREEN in green). In fact, successful performance on the Stroop task correlates modestly with Gf measures (see, e.g., Dempster & Corkill, 1999;Pati & Dash, 1990;Valentine, 1975) and varies significantly with WM span (Kane & Engle, in press). With respect to Gf, Boone (1999) found that, after age was controlled for, full-scale IQ accounted for 13% of Stroop variance.…”

Brain imaging of the central executive component of working memory

“…In other words, they require "controlled attention" capacity, which is a domain-free attentional capacity to maintain or suppress actively working memory representations [45]. The other interpretation is that the three executive functions involve an inhibitory capacity, which is considered by certain authors as a basic unit of working memory or executive functioning [e.g., 37,130]. Taken as a whole, the results of this study suggest that executive functioning is characterized both by the unity and diversity of processes.…”

“…This study was based on the principle of the reading span test [37] which requires concurrent processing (reading sentences for comprehension) and short-term maintenance (remembering the last word of each sentence) of a same material. Cerebral activity was measured by fMRI in four conditions: (1) to read and evaluate five statements as true or false, (2) to remember the last word of five sequentially presented sentences, (3) to evaluate five sentences and remember the final word of each sentence (dual condition) and (4) a control task in which participants viewed meaningless consonant strings.…”

Specificity of inhibitory deficits in normal aging and Alzheimer's disease

“…Other authors viewed inhibition as a general process operating in various cognitive domains. In that context, Dempster and Corkill [34,35] have suggested making a distinction between perceptual, motor and verbal inhibition. Inhibitory tasks were also classified according to the following three dimensions: (1) intentional vs. unintentional, (2) behavioral vs. cognitive, and (3) inhibition vs. interference [46].…”