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Related Experiment Video

Updated: May 23, 2026

Disruption of Frontal Lobe Neural Synchrony During Cognitive Control by Alcohol Intoxication

Disruption of Frontal Lobe Neural Synchrony During Cognitive Control by Alcohol Intoxication

Published on: February 6, 2019

The relationship between alertness and executive control.

Noam Weinbach¹, Avishai Henik

¹Department of Psychology, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev, P.O. Box 635, Beer-Sheva, Israel 84105. noam.weinbach@gmail.com

Journal of Experimental Psychology. Human Perception and Performance

|April 4, 2012

Summary

This summary is machine-generated.

Alerting enhances attention but only for certain tasks. This study found alerting increases task difficulty when irrelevant spatial information must be filtered, impacting executive attention.

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Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and other EEG Based Methods for Extracting Biomarkers of Brain Dysfunction: Examples from Pediatric Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

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Published on: March 12, 2020

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Last Updated: May 23, 2026

Disruption of Frontal Lobe Neural Synchrony During Cognitive Control by Alcohol Intoxication

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Published on: February 6, 2019

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and other EEG Based Methods for Extracting Biomarkers of Brain Dysfunction: Examples from Pediatric Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Event Related Potentials (ERPs) and other EEG Based Methods for Extracting Biomarkers of Brain Dysfunction: Examples from Pediatric Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Published on: March 12, 2020

Area of Science:

Cognitive Psychology
Neuroscience
Attention Research

Background:

Previous research indicates alerting cues amplify the flanker congruency effect.
The interaction between alerting and executive attention is not fully understood across different tasks.

Purpose of the Study:

To investigate the nuanced relationship between alerting and executive attention.
To determine how alerting affects performance on various executive tasks, specifically flanker and Stroop tasks.
To explore the conditions under which alerting influences the congruency effect in response selection.

Main Methods:

Four experiments were conducted to examine the alertness-congruency interaction.
Tasks included flanker, Stroop, and response selection paradigms.
The role of spatial separation between relevant and irrelevant information was manipulated.

Main Results:

The alertness-congruency interaction was task-dependent, appearing in the flanker task but not the Stroop task.
Alerting amplified the congruency effect in a response selection task solely when information was spatially separated.
Alerting prioritized spatial information processing in the visual field.

Conclusions:

Alerting's effect on executive attention is modulated by task demands and information presentation.
Alerting may enhance performance by prioritizing spatial processing but can impair filtering of irrelevant spatial information.
This suggests a potential cost to attentional prioritization when spatial filtering is critical.