ArticlePLoS biology2005
Parsing a cognitive task: a characterization of the mind's bottleneck.
Article in PLoS biology, 2005. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 63 papers.
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Who cites it
63 citing papers in PubMed.
- The cost of serially chaining two cognitive operations.Psychological research · 2012Trial
- Deliberation in the motor system: reflex gains track evolving evidence leading to a decision.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2012Trial
- Trans-saccadic processing of visual and motor planning during sequential eye movements.Experimental brain research · 2011Trial
- Trial
- The impact of instrumental music on dual-task interference in a simulated driving environment.Psychological research · 2026Article
- The Spatio-Temporal Dynamics of Phoneme Encoding in Aging and Aphasia.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural basis of concurrent deliberation toward a choice and confidence judgment.Nature neuroscience · 2026Article
- Neural basis of concurrent deliberation toward a choice and confidence judgment.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- C-SMB 2.0: Integrating over 25 years of motor sequencing research with the Discrete Sequence Production task.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2024Review
- Examining the Impact of Reading Fluency on Lexical Decision Results in French 6th Graders.Open mind : discoveries in cognitive science · 2024Article
- A global neuronal workspace model of functional neurological disorders.Dialogues in clinical neuroscience · 2024Review
- A reservoir of foraging decision variables in the mouse brain.Nature neuroscience · 2023Article
- The Construct Validity of Intellect and Openness as Distinct Aspects of Personality through Differential Associations with Reaction Time.Journal of Intelligence · 2023Article
- Article
- The working memory costs of a central attentional bottleneck in multitasking.Psychological research · 2022Article
- Decreasing Alertness Modulates Perceptual Decision-Making.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2022Article
- An adaptive paradigm for detecting the individual duration of the preparatory period in the choice reaction time task.PloS one · 2022Article
- Inter-Individual Differences in Executive Functions Predict Multitasking Performance - Implications for the Central Attentional Bottleneck.Frontiers in psychology · 2022Article
- Neural mechanisms underlying the temporal control of sequential saccade planning in the frontal eye field.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- The distance effect on discrimination ability and response bias during magnitude comparison in a go/no-go task.Attention, perception & psychophysics · 2021Article
3 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Parsing a mental operation into components, characterizing the parallel or serial nature of this flow, and understanding what each process ultimately contributes to response time are fundamental questions in cognitive neuroscience. Here we show how a simple theoretical model leads to an extended set of predictions concerning the distribution of response time and its alteration by simultaneous performance of another task. The model provides a synthesis of psychological refractory period and random-walk models of response time. It merely assumes that a task consists of three consecutive stages-perception, decision based on noisy integration of evidence, and response-and that the perceptual and motor stages can operate simultaneously with stages of another task, while the central decision process constitutes a bottleneck. We designed a number-comparison task that provided a thorough test of the model by allowing independent variations in number notation, numerical distance, response complexity, and temporal asynchrony relative to an interfering probe task of tone discrimination. The results revealed a parsing of the comparison task in which each variable affects only one stage. Numerical distance affects the integration process, which is the only step that cannot proceed in parallel and has a major contribution to response time variability. The other stages, mapping the numeral to an internal quantity and executing the motor response, can be carried out in parallel with another task. Changing the duration of these processes has no significant effect on the variance.
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Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.