Gene A Brewer

• The University of Georgia

Working memory capacity (WMC) has received a great deal of attention in cognitive psychology partly because WMC correlates broadly with other abilities (e.g., reading comprehension, second-language proficiency, fluid intelligence) and thus seems to be a critical aspect of cognitive ability. However, it is still rigorously debated why such correlati...

One mechanism by which transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) has been proposed to improve attention is by transcutaneous stimulation of cranial nerves, thereby activating the locus coeruleus (LC). Specifically, placement of the electrodes over the frontal bone and mastoid is thought to facilitate current flow across the face as a path of l...

The noradrenaline (NA) system is one of the brain’s major neuromodulatory systems; it originates in a small midbrain nucleus, the locus coeruleus (LC), and projects widely throughout the brain.¹,² The LC-NA system is believed to regulate arousal and attention³,⁴ and is a pharmacological target in multiple clinical conditions.⁵,⁶,⁷ Yet our understan...

Latent variable analyses of cognitive abilities are among the major means by which cognitive psychologists test theories regarding the structure of human cognition. Models are fit to observed variance-covariance structures, and the fit of those models are compared to assess the merits of competing theories. However, an often unconsidered and potent...

The current set of studies examined the relationship among working memory capacity, attention control, fluid intelligence, and pupillary correlates of tonic arousal regulation and phasic responsiveness in a combined sample of more than 1,000 participants in two different age ranges (young adults and adolescents). Each study was designed to test pre...

The associative theory of creativity has long held that creative thinking involves connecting remote concepts in semantic memory. Network science tools have recently been applied to map the organization of concepts in semantic memory, and to study the link between semantic memory and creativity. Yet such work has largely overlooked the domain of co...

Most laboratory research in the field of prospective memory has focused on newly formed (episodic) intentions that are carried out in the experimental context once or only a small number of times. However, many naturalistic prospective memories are carried out many times and these types of (habitual) intentions have been studied much less in the la...

Motivation is a powerful driver of learning and memory. Functional MRI studies show that interactions between the dopaminergic midbrain (SN/VTA), hippocampus, and nucleus accumbens (NAc) are critical for motivated memory encoding. However, it is not known if these effects are transient and purely functional, or if individual differences in the stru...

Motivation is a powerful driver of learning and memory. Functional MRI studies show that interactions between the dopaminergic midbrain (SN/VTA), hippocampus, and nucleus accumbens (NAc) are critical for motivated memory encoding. However, it is not known if these effects are transient and purely functional, or if individual differences in the stru...

The present study examined individual differences in 3 cognitive abilities: attention control (AC), working memory capacity (WMC), and fluid intelligence (gF) as they relate the tendency to experience task-unrelated thoughts (TUTs) and the regulation of arousal. Cognitive abilities were measured with a battery of 9 laboratory tasks, TUTs were measu...

Binaural beats have been used as a way of modifying cognition via auditory stimulation. A recent meta-analysis suggests that binaural beat stimulation can have a positive effect on attention (Garcia-Argibay et al., Psychologische Forschung 83:1124–1136, 2019a, Psychological Research Psychologische Forschung 83:357–372, 2019b), with the sample-weigh...

Research suggests that individuals with lower working memory have difficulty remembering to fulfil delayed intentions. The current study examined whether the ability to offload intentions onto the environment mitigated these deficits. Participants (N = 268) completed three versions of a delayed intention task with and without the use of reminders,...

Successful prospective memory (PM) involves not only detecting that an environmental cue requires action (i.e., prospective component), but also retrieval of what is supposed to be done at the appropriate moment (i.e., retrospective component). The current study examined the role of attention and memory during PM tasks that placed distinct demands...

The study of human reaction time (RT) is invaluable not only to understand the sensory-motor functions but also to translate brain signals into machine comprehensible commands that can facilitate augmentative and alternative communication using brain-computer interfaces (BCI). Recent developments in sensor technologies, hardware computational capab...

The current study leveraged experimental and individual differences methodology to examine whether false memories across different list-learning tasks arise from a common cause. Participants completed multiple false memory (associative and conjunction lure), working memory (operation and reading span), and source monitoring (verbal and picture) tas...

Successful prospective memory (PM) involves not only detecting that an environmental cue requires action (i.e., prospective component), but also retrieval of what is supposed to be done at the appropriate moment (i.e., retrospective component). The current study examined the role of attention and memory during PM tasks that placed distinct demands...

Merit principles have served as central tenets of the U.S. civil service system since the late 19th Century, but in recent decades reforms have been proposed and implemented that weaken central aspects of merit. This makes it important to seek evidence about how government employees perceive the status of merit principles and to examine relationshi...

Across four experiments we examined the effects of goal-setting, feedback, and incentivizing manipulations on sustained attention. In addition to measuring task performance, we measured subjective attentional states and momentary feelings of motivation and alertness. Experiment 1 compared two specific goal conditions-one difficult and one easy-with...

Pain affects the lives of many individuals by creating physical, psychological, and economic burdens. A critical psychological factor negatively affected by pain is one's ability to sustain attention. In order to better understand the effect of pain on sustained attention we conducted three experiments utilizing the psychomotor vigilance task, thou...

For managers in public service organizations, stakeholders are very important as they have different and sometimes conflicting values. Yet, public administration scholars often neglect the stakeholders despite their vital role in defining good performance in democratic political systems. This chapter combines theoretical perspectives on public valu...

The concluding chapter synthesizes the insights and gives a comprehensive answer to the volume’s overall question. It sets directions for future research and discusses implications for public organizations’ practice. There is ample evidence that management contributes to performance, both directly and indirectly, through influencing employees’ (pub...

This chapter introduces the overall question that is central to this volume: How does management make a meaningful contribution to public service performance? A summary review of our knowledge of the concepts and relationships that feature in this overall question is provided. Describing the gaps in our knowledge, the chapter explains the approach...

Individuals encounter problems daily wherein varying numbers of constraints require delimitation of memory to target goal-satisfying information. Multiply-constrained problems, such as the compound remote associates, are commonly used to study this type of problem solving. Since their development, multiply-constrained problems have been theoretical...

Research suggests that forcing participants to withhold responding for as brief as 600 ms eliminates one of the most reliable findings in prospective memory (PM): the cue focality effect. This result undermines the conventional view that controlled attentional monitoring processes support PM, and instead suggests that cue detection results from inc...

A standard finding in the event-based prospective memory literature is that focal cues are more often detected than nonfocal cues. The multiprocess view of prospective memory accounts for this result by suggesting that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC)-mediated executive processes are necessary for nonfocal cue detection while hippocampally me...

Capacity limits in cognition require that valuable information be prioritized for encoding and retrieval. Individual differences in prioritized value-directed encoding may derive from differences in the general ability to encode memories, or from differences in how strategies are altered for different stimuli to modulate maintenance in working memo...

Recent work in attentional control has suggested that conflict effects measured across different tasks are not reliable and by extension unrelated. The lack of correlation between these conflict effects is in juxtaposition not only to theoretical predictions of a domain-general attentional control mechanism but also to a large body of individual di...

Replication is an important mechanism through which broad lessons for theory and practice can be drawn in the applied interdisciplinary social science field of public administration. We suggest a common replication framework for public administration that is illustrated by experimental work in the field. Drawing on knowledge from other disciplines,...

The prioritized encoding and retrieval of valuable information is an essential aspect of human memory. We used electroencephalography (EEG) to determine which of two hypothesized processes underlies the influence of reward value on episodic memory. One hypothesis is that value engages prefrontal executive control processes, so that valuable stimuli...

Much of the groundbreaking theoretical and applied research in the field of prospective memory has focused on differentiating prospective memory from retrospective memory. This work has led to the distinction between the prospective and retrospective components of prospective memory, which reflect the attentional processes involved in noticing the...

Prospective memory refers to planning and completing intentions for future action. The focus of the present study is on habitual prospective memory, which is one’s ability to routinize and fulfill intentions on a consistent basis. This skill is especially useful for populations with impaired executive functioning and/or memory deficits, such as tho...

Replication is an important mechanism through which broad lessons for theory and practice can be drawn in the applied interdisciplinary social science field of public administration. We suggest a common replication framework for public administration that is illustrated by experimental work in the field. Drawing on knowledge from other disciplines,...

Recent work on cognitive control focuses on the conflict-monitoring hypothesis , which posits that a performance monitoring mechanism recruits regions in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex to ensure that goal-directed behavior is optimal. Critical to this theory is that a single performance monitoring mechanism explains a large number of behavioral...

Prospective memory refers to the planning, retention, retrieval, and execution of intentions for future behaviours and it is integral to the enterprise of daily living. Although prospective memory relies upon retrospective memory and executive processes often disrupted by pain, limited research has explored the influence of acute or chronic pain on...

An emerging literature on value-directed remembering has shown that people are able to encode and remember information that is more important. Researchers operationalize importance by differentially assigning value to the memoranda that participants are asked to encode and remember. In the present investigation, a slightly altered value-directed-re...

The neurobiology of bilingualism is hotly debated. The present study examines whether normalized cortical measurements can be used to reliably classify monolinguals versus bilinguals in a structural MRI dataset of Farsi-English bilinguals and English monolinguals. A decision tree classifier classified bilinguals with an average correct classificati...

Understanding and resolving complex problems is of vital importance in daily life. Problems can be defined by the limitations they place on the problem solver. Multiply-constrained problems are traditionally examined with the compound remote associates task (CRAT). Performance on the CRAT is partially dependent on an individual's working memory cap...

Individual differences in working memory capacity partly arise from variability in attention control, a process influenced by negative emotional content. Thus, individual differences in working memory capacity should predict differences in the ability to regulate attention in emotional contexts. To address this hypothesis, a complex-span working me...

Decisions to trust help form the basis of relationships and society yet little is known about their neurophysiology. We told participants they were playing a coin toss game with a trustworthy and an untrustworthy person and measured their neural activity with EEG as they decided whether to trust those fictitious interaction partners. Target people...

Output monitoring refers to memory for one’s previously completed actions. In the context of prospective memory (e.g., remembering to take medication), failures of output monitoring can result in repetitions and omissions of planned actions (e.g., over- or under-medication). To be successful in output monitoring paradigms, participants must flexibl...

Output monitoring refers to memory for one’s previously completed actions. In the context of prospective memory (e.g., remembering to take medication), failures of output monitoring can result in repetitions and omissions of planned actions (e.g., over- or under-medication). To be successful in output monitoring paradigms, participants must flexibl...

The present study implemented an individual differences approach in conjunction with response time (RT) variability and distribution modeling techniques to better characterize the cognitive control dynamics underlying ongoing task cost (i.e., slowing) and cue detection in event-based prospective memory (PM). Three experiments assessed the relation...

In everyday life, mental fatigue can be detrimental across many domains including driving, learning, and working. Given the importance of understanding and accounting for the deleterious effects of mental fatigue on behavior, a growing body of literature has studied the role of motivational and executive control processes in mental fatigue. In typi...

The proportion congruency effect refers to the observation that the magnitude of the Stroop effect increases as the proportion of congruent trials in a block increases. Contemporary work shows that proportion effects can be driven by both context and individual items, and are referred to as context-specific proportion congruency (CSPC) and item-spe...

Replication is increasingly recognized as an important part of knowledge production in the social sciences, especially for experimental research. However, despite growing use of experiments, replication is little discussed or practiced in public management. We review the approach to replication taken by research in leading public management journal...

Recent theories have proposed that contingency learning occurs independent of control processes. These parallel processing accounts propose that behavioral effects originally thought to be products of control processes are in fact products solely of contingency learning. This view runs contrary to conflict-mediated Hebbian-learning models that posi...

Previous research on the relation between working memory capacity (WMC) and shooting behavior suggests that individuals with low working memory spans are more prone to shooting errors than are individuals with high working memory spans. The present study investigated how WMC interacts with the proportion of “shoot” to “don’t shoot” decisions to aff...

Civil service reforms implemented over the past 35 years in many countries around the world have relaxed traditional merit system rules, decentralized the personnel function, and augmented agency and managerial discretion. One objective of these reforms has been to boost government productivity and increase the efficiency of core personnel manageme...

Red tape studies typically focus on burdensome rules that have negative effects on organizations, as perceived by managers. The one-item general red tape scale is representative of this approach. However, scholars have called for improved measures that address the scale's shortcomings. This article introduces a new measurement scale that features (...

Over the past two decades, research on public service motivation has seen rapid growth. Despite the relatively large number of publications to date, no systematic research overview has been created, leaving the body of literature somewhat unstructured and possibly hampering future research. This article fills this void by providing a systematic lit...

Socioeconomic status has been linked to differences in the degree to which people are attuned to others. Those who are lower in SES also tend to be more interpersonally attuned. However, to date, this work has not been demonstrated using neural measures. In the present EEG study we found evidence that lower SES was linked to stronger Mu-suppression...

Trust is a critical aspect of social interaction. One might predict that individuals trust religious out-groups less than religious in-groups, and that costly signals performed by members of religious in-groups increase trust while costly signals performed by members of religious out-groups decrease trust. We examined how Christian participants per...

Many factors improve prospective memory performance both inside and outside of the laboratory, including the detailed planning of the situational cue and intended action (i.e., implementation intentions). In the current study, we obtained measures of working memory capacity and laboratory event-based prospective memory performance in college-aged a...

The present study tested whether socioeconomic status (SES) was linked to differences in the strength of neural empathic responses. Following previous research we measured fronto-central P2 responses to images of neutral faces and faces expressing pain. As predicted we found that higher SES was linked to diminished neural empathic responses. Intere...

The social capital of the communities served by public service organizations is arguably a key determinant of their success. The performance of those organizations may also be shaped by the managerial strategies adopted by organizational leaders. In this study, we explore whether an innovative, outward-looking strategy can enhance the social capita...

Among college students, public service motives influence choice of major or job. Although the link between public service motives and prosocial behavior has been established among working adults, researchers have not adequately examined how these motives affect the reported behavior of precareer students. In this article, the authors explored how p...

Interpersonal reality monitoring (IRM) refers to our ability to evaluate whether other people's memories reflect real or imagined events. The current work examined IRM and whether or not it can be affected by training and feedback. We found that people are better than chance and that the ability to accurately make this judgement can be improved or...

This article reviews the evolution of almost 25 years of public service motivation research in order to identify what is necessary to raise future research to a higher level. First, we look at the rise in public service motivation research and try to provide an explanation for the increasing number of publications. Second, we review the empirical r...

Previous research has shown that perceptual characteristics of stimuli inaccurately bias assessments of perceived memorability. However, little research has investigated how perceptual information using real-world study materials affects study time allocation and assessments of future memory performance. In the current study, participants studied a...

Highlights: The conflict monitoring hypothesis signals the need for cognitive control The Gratton effect is a key result attributed to the conflict monitoring hypothesis Some argue that controlling binding confounds eliminates the Gratton effect A Gratton effect remains in a vocal Stroop task after eliminating confounds The Gratton effect, the obs...

The current study implemented response time distribution modeling to better characterize context-specific attention dynamics underlying task interference due to possessing a prospective memory intention. During a three-phase paradigm in which prospective memory cues only appeared in the final phase, prospective memory performance was better when pa...

The present study implemented response time distribution modeling to better characterize context-specific attention dynamics underlying task interference due to possessing a prospective memory intention. During a three-phase paradigm in which prospective memory cues appeared only in the final phase, prospective memory performance was better when pa...

We constructed an 11-arm, walk-through, human radial-arm maze (HRAM) as a translational instrument to compare existing methodology in the areas of rodent and human learning and memory research. The HRAM, utilized here, serves as an intermediary test between the classic rat radial-arm maze (RAM) and standard human neuropsychological and cognitive te...

Remembering to perform an intention in the future when some environmental cue is encountered is referred to as event-based prospective memory. The influence of mood on this future-oriented memory is unclear. By experimentally manipulating mood, the current set of experiments sought to examine the influence that differing mood states have on encodin...

Remembering to perform an intention in the future when some environmental cue is encountered is referred to as event-based prospective memory. The influence of mood on this future-oriented memory is unclear. By experimentally manipulating mood, the current set of experiments sought to examine the influence that differing mood states have on encodin...

An experimental research design is adopted to explore the potential impact of cultural differences in East Asia and the United States on perceptions of public ownership and governmental performance (efficiency, equity, and probity). While passionate debate has influenced governments on the merits of public or private organizations' delivery of publ...

Searching long-term memory is theoretically driven by both directed (search strategies) and random components. In the current study we conducted four experiments evaluating strategic search in semantic and autobiographical memory. Participants were required to generate either exemplars from the category of animals or the names of their friends for...

Introduction: This study examines individual differences in navigational strategy to test and translate between active spatial reasoning models in human and rodent research. We built a real-world, 50-foot diameter, 11-arm walk-through Human Radial-Arm Maze (HRAM) to parallel the Rodent Radial-Arm Maze (RRAM). Methods: 157 participants performed the...

Targeting information in long-term memory is an important cognitive ability, but one that is not well understood. In this study, 4 experiments were conducted to examine the influence of proactive and retroactive interference on memory targeting. Participants were given either 1 or 2 lists and asked to recall List 1, List 2, or in some cases both li...

Working memory processes play a critical role in actively maintaining, rehearsing, and retrieving goal-relevant information during cognitively engaging tasks. In the current study, we examined individual differences in prospective memory between young adults with high versus low working memory capacity (WMC) when they had to momentarily delay their...

This article explores societal culture as an antecedent of public service motivation. Culture can be a major factor in developing an institution-based theory of public service motivation. In the field of organization theory, culture is considered a fundamental factor for explaining organization behavior. But our review of the literature reveals tha...

In this article, we describe and explore the topics, methods, and author arrangements of the English language literature on public administration in East and Southeast Asia. Articles in the review are for the period 1999-2009 and were identified in the Web of Science. Searches identified 309 articles in the disciplinary area of public administratio...

In recent years, many public sector reforms have attempted to loosen personnel constraints on the assumption that more managerial flexibility will increase organizational performance. The authors mount an empirical study to test this assumption using data taken from English local government authorities. Personnel constraints are operationalized usi...

This paper describes a novel method of representing semantic networks of stories (and other text) as a two-mode graph. This method has some advantages over traditional one-mode semantic networks, but has the potential drawback (shared with n-gram text networks) that it contains paths that are not present in the text. An empirical study was devised...

The present study examined individual differences in everyday retrospective memory failures. Undergraduate students completed various cognitive ability measures in the laboratory and recorded everyday retrospective memory failures in a diary over the course of a week. The majority of memory failures were forgetting information pertaining to exams a...

In two experiments, the role of working memory capacity (WMC) in the controlled search of long-term memory was examined. Participants performed a prolonged category fluency task that required them to retrieve as many animals as possible in 5 min. The results suggested that WMC differences arose in the numbers of animals retrieved, the numbers of cl...

In two experiments, the locus of individual differences in working memory capacity and long-term memory recall was examined. Participants performed categorical cued and free recall tasks, and individual differences in the dynamics of recall were interpreted in terms of a hierarchical-search framework. The results from this study are in accordance w...

The present study examined individual differences in everyday cognitive failures assessed by diaries. A large sample of participants completed various cognitive ability measures in the laboratory. Furthermore, a subset of these participants also recorded everyday cognitive failures (attention, retrospective memory, and prospective memory failures)...

Associating intentions to events that cue future behaviors is a central aspect of human cognition. There is limited understanding of the neural dynamics supporting recognition of intention-related events, with little known about how pre-event brain state varies as a function of intention specificity. Prior to recognized events (that cued planned be...

The present study examined individual differences in everyday attention failures. Undergraduate students completed various cognitive ability measures in the laboratory and recorded everyday attention failures in a diary over the course of a week. The majority of attention failures were failures of distraction or mind wandering in educational contex...

The current study examined individual differences in the effects of retrieval from long-term memory (i.e., the testing effect). The effects of retrieving from memory make tested information more accessible for future retrieval attempts. Despite the broad applied ramifications of such a potent memorization technique there is a paucity of research ta...

Remembering previous experiences from one's personal past is a principal component of psychological well-being, personality, sense of self, decision making, and planning for the future. In the current study the ability to search for autobiographical information in memory was examined by having college students recall their Facebook friends. Individ...

Retrieval dynamics in context-dependent recall were explored via manipulations of external and internal context in two experiments. Participants were tested in either the same or different context as the material was learned in and correct recalls, errors, and recall latency measures were examined. In both experiments changes in context resulted in...

Many scholars and policy-makers contend that social capital and management capacity are associated with better public services. It is also likely that organizations with the capacity to manage effective co-production are better able to realize these benefits. To test these assumptions, we explore the independent and combined effects of social capit...

While there is a large body of literature examining the effect of public service motivation (PSM) on both an individual's career and volunteering decisions, the effects of social learning and parental influences on both volunteerism and selection into public service have been relatively unexplored. This study examines the relationship between paren...

The dynamics of free recall in the list-before-last task were examined in the current study. List-length was manipulated and probability of recall was influenced by target list-length but not by intervening list-length. Participants also performed free recall on control lists matched on target list-length. Critically, list-before-last recall was wo...

This case study reviews the enactment and implementation of the National Security Personnel System (NSPS) in the U.S. Department of Defense. Proponents of reform seized the opportunity to enact reform in the aftermath of 9/11, basing their arguments on national security concerns. However, the policymaking process did not produce a consensus for ref...

This study investigates structural and management reforms in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) field office delivery system over the past decade. During this period, the department has implemented the most massive restructuring in its 141-year history. Change has been introduced through several successive waves of reform linked to “Reinve...