Michael B. Steinborn

Ludic design in mental chronometry seeks to enhance engagement through socio-interactive elements. The present study examined whether a co-actor duel context influences both performance and subjective experience. Participants completed speeded arithmetic at two difficulty levels (easy, hard) under two context conditions (alone, duel) in a mixed within-subject design. Self-reports of engagement, distress, and worry were obtained before and after tasks. In the duel context, participants completed problems more quickly, accompanied by a small rise in errors, which however, remained far below the 10% margin allowed by duel rules, indicating that the increase was not a deliberate sacrifice of accuracy for speed. We interpret the speed-up as improved efficiency with preserved engagement, where the modest error rise reflects the probabilistic cost of reduced checking time rather than relaxed accuracy criteria. Such minor differences are unlikely to be consciously detected and therefore are not introspectable as a performance decline.

We examined aspects of social alerting as induced through the presence of an attentive but non-evaluative confederate on mental efficiency. To this end, individuals were administered with a chained mental-arithmetic task (levels: low vs. high demand) in two contextual conditions (levels: alone vs. presence). In addition, we examined self-report measures of subjective state for purposes of control. As a result, the presence (vs. alone) condition improved (not hampered) processing speed (while error rate remained low overall), and this effect was differentially more pronounced for high (vs. low) demand. Reaction-time distributional analyses revealed that improvements in average performance actually originated from a selective speeding-up in the slower percentiles, indicating that social alerting promotes stability of information-processing throughput. These results challenge prevalent theoretical notions of mere-presence effects as individuals became consistently faster and less vulnerable to commit attention failure. Our findings indicate that social presence promotes not only processing speed but volitional steadiness.

We examined the effect of motivational readiness on cognitive performance. An important but still not sufficiently elaborated question is whether individuals can voluntarily increase cognitive efficiency for an impending target event, given sufficient preparation time. Within the framework of the constant-foreperiod design (comparing reaction time performance in blocks of short and long foreperiod intervals, FPs), we examined the effect of an instruction to try harder (instructional cue: standard vs. effort) in a choice-reaction task on performance speed and variability. Proceeding from previous theoretical considerations, we expected the instruction to speed-up processing irrespective of FP length, while error rate should be increased in the short-FP but decreased in the long-FP condition. Overall, the results confirmed this prediction. Importantly, the distributional (ex-Gaussian and delta plot) analysis revealed that the instruction to try harder decreased distributional skewness (i.e., longer percentiles were more affected), indicating that mobilization ensured temporal performance stability (persistence).

Summary: We investigated the effect of rest breaks on mental‐arithmetic performance, examining performance as a function of the factor rest, time‐on‐task, and demand. We asked the following questions: (i) Does rest (vs a continuous‐work condition) improve cognitive performance? (ii) Is active rest (taking a walk) better than passive rest (watching a video)? (iii) Do compensatory effects of rest increase with time‐at‐work? (iv) Are there differential effects of rest on automatic and controlled processes? (v) Are there differential effects of rest on performance speed versus variability? The results indicate that while rest is generally beneficial for performance, these benefits are similar for active and passive rest. The benefits increase with time‐on‐task and are larger for high (vs low) demand. Further, the effects on average response speed originated only partially from a reduction in the probability of attentional failure, as indicated by reaction‐time (ex‐Gaussian model) distributional and delta‐plot analysis.Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Summary: The goal of this study is to understand the interface between subjectively assessed and objectively measured attention functioning. To this end, we assessed both self‐report data using the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (CFQ) and sustained‐attention performance using a low‐demand psychomotor vigilance task that required participants to respond to visual targets. Unlike previous studies, reliability of task performance was ensured, testing individuals twice within a retest interval of 1 week. Given that everyday life attentional lapse tendencies vary even in normal‐population samples, we asked whether there is a relationship with laboratory performance, in general and as a consequence of time on task (TOT). As a result, low (versus high) CFQ scorers were somewhat different in their average response speed but became particularly prone to lapsing during the task period, as reflected in standard measures of response‐speed variability as well as ex‐Gaussian parameters of distributional skewness. In conclusion, we argue that persistence to sustained demand might be an important aspect of construct validity that must be evoked by a manipulation of TOT, which may be useful for the evaluation of questionnaires in ecologically valid situations. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.