Fig 1.
Logic of cognitive slack and predicted reaction times.
A. Schematic depiction of the logic of cognitive slack. Early (E), central (C), and late (L) processes of Task 1 (T1) and Task 2 (T2) of a PRP paradigm, for long and short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) conditions. Top. Difficulty manipulation of a central T2 process, which is non-automatic, i.e. which needs the central bottleneck to proceed, with the difficulty effect predicted not to differ between SOA conditions. Bottom. Difficulty manipulation of an early T2 process, which is automatic, i.e. located before the central bottleneck, with the difficulty effect predicted to be absorbed into slack (-—-) in the short SOA condition. B. Predicted reaction times (RT) for T2 (extracted from panel A and synchronized to the start of T2), for the long SOA condition on the left and the short SOA condition on the right. The key prediction is highlighted in red. Specifically, the difficulty manipulation of a non-automatic process (top) is predicted to have the same effect on RT in the short and long SOA condition. On the other hand, the difficulty manipulation of an automatic process (bottom) is predicted to have an effect in the long SOA condition, but this effect should be eliminated (or diminished) in the short SOA condition.
Fig 2.
Response times as a function of stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), lexicality (words versus pseudowords) and orthographic neighborhood size (ON).
Error bars show SEMs after removal of the irrelevant overall between-subject differences (based on [68]).
Table 1.
Performance in the tone discrimination task (RT1 and %E1), and error rates in the lexical decision (%E2).
Fig 3.
Orthographic neighborhood effects on event-related brain potentials to words.
Top. Influences of orthographic neighborhood (ON) size on event-related brain potentials at centro-parietal electrode sites, to the left in conditions of low task overlap (SOA 700) and to the right in conditions of high task overlap (SOA 100). Bottom. Topographical distributions of the above depicted ON effects (many minus few ON).
Fig 4.
Orthographic neighborhood effects on event-related brain potentials to pseudowords.
Top. Influences of orthographic neighborhood (ON) size on event-related brain potentials at centro-parietal electrode sites, to the left in conditions of low task overlap (SOA 700) and to the right in conditions of high task overlap (SOA 100). Bottom. Topographical distributions of the above depicted ON effects (many minus few ON).
Fig 5.
Difference waves corresponding to orthographic neighborhood effects (many minus few orthographic neighbors).
For words (left) and pseudowords (right) at a centro-parietal region of interest (ROI; consisting of Cz, CPz, CP1, CP2, and Pz), as a function of task overlap (SOA 700 vs. SOA 100).
Table 2.
ANOVA results of ERP amplitudes.
Fig 6.
Orthographic neighbourhood effects on RTs (left) and ERPs (right) as a function of SOA.
See text for details.
Fig 7.
A trial started with a fixation cross. After 2 s, a tone of 60 ms duration and either high or low pitch was presented, requiring a pitch discrimination via a foot response (task 1). After a stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) of either 100 or 700 ms, a letter string (either a word or a pseudoword) replaced the fixation cross on the screen, requiring a lexical decision via button press with the left or right index finger (Task 2). The letter string remained on the screen until both responses had been given for a maximum of 2.5 ms.