g., type and frequency of specific selection instances), critically determine the potency of LTM traces, which then eventually lead to the costs of selecting between competing control settings. It is a truism that interruptions of ongoing activities

harm fluent and effective performance. However, we currently do not have a full understanding of when and why exactly interruptions––an omnipresent reality in most real-world work environments––actually do have negative effects. One thing we do know is that at least after interruptions of cumulative tasks (i.e., where one needs to take off exactly where one stopped before the interruption) there is a time cost in terms of re-establishing the current task context in working memory (e.g., Altman & Trafton, 2007). The current results point to an additional factor. If our explanation Navitoclax of the cost-asymmetry is correct then every recovery from an interruption will force the system into an updating state during which it is vulnerable to alternative paths of action. Take for example a typical, complex work situation with multiple tasks that need to be performed before the day is done. These additional demands may have little effect while one is absorbed in the currently prioritized task. However, once pulled away (e.g., through the email inbox signal) the return to that task may easily go astray because

that requires crossing a Veliparib choice point during which the system is temporarily open to all alternative paths of action that are currently activated in LTM. Thus, one potential danger of interruptions may lie in increasing the number of these choice points, a hypothesis that can be tested empirically and that may have important practical consequences for how to operate in or Selleck Lonafarnib design multi-tasking environments. The current work allows two broad conclusions. First, while exogenous control of attention may be fast and effortless,

the process of intentionally adopting such a control setting produces larger behavioral costs than when adopting an endogenous control setting. Second, our pattern of results suggests that at least two things need to come together to produce interference when adopting an exogenous task setting: the presence of interfering LTM traces and an updating working memory mode, as triggered for example while recovering from an interruption. We propose that this model also provides a more general explanation of the types of costs regularly obtained in task-switching situations than the assumption of trial-to-trial carry-over between competing tasks or control settings. This research was partially supported by National Institute of Aging grant RO1 AG037564-01A1. “
“Number is one of the core competences of the human mind (Carey, 2009, Dehaene, 1997 and Dehaene and Brannon, 2011). From birth, human infants discriminate between sets on the basis of number (Feigenson et al., 2004, Izard et al.