Susan E Teubner-Rhodes

Auburn University | AU · Department of Psychology

During difficult tasks, conflict can benefit performance on a subsequent trial. One theory for such performance adjustments is that people monitor for conflict and reactively engage cognitive control. This hypothesis has been challenged because tasks that control for associative learning do not show such “cognitive control” effects. The current stu...

Background This research utilizes Virtual Reality as a non-conventional, informal educational setting to measure the impact of presence on human working memory performance. Many researchers have assessed human working memory and working memory performance (WMP) by computerizing a task and calculating the participant’s score. Objective In this work,...

Today Virtual Reality is widely researched and applied in non-conventional, informal educational settings, psychology, and memory-based applications. The popular definition of working memory is a system that works to provide temporary access to a select set of representations allowing for manipulation [1]. However, there is a consensus that this sy...

Extensive increases in cingulo-opercular frontal activity are typically observed during speech recognition in noise tasks. This elevated activity has been linked to a word recognition benefit on the next trial, termed “adaptive control,” but how this effect might be implemented has been unclear. The established link between perceptual decision maki...

Older adults with hearing loss experience significant difficulties understanding speech in noise, perhaps due in part to limited benefit from supporting executive functions that enable the use of environmental cues signaling changes in listening conditions. Here we examined the degree to which 41 older adults (60.56–86.25 years) exhibited cortical...

Researchers have debated the extent to which the experience of speaking more than two languages induces long-term neuroplasticity that protects multilinguals from the adverse cognitive effects of aging. In this review, I propose a novel theory that multilingualism affects cognitive persistence, the application of effort to improve performance on ch...

Hearing scientists are increasingly incorporating physiological techniques into auditory research. This chapter will review three popular physiological approaches and their applications to listening: 1) functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a method of mapping brain regions that support cognitive and behavioral functions; 2) electroencephal...

Bilinguals sometimes outperform monolinguals on tasks involving cognitive control – the regulation of mental activity when confronted with information-processing conflict – perhaps stemming from experience monitoring for and resolving conflict between languages. We test the hypothesis that bilingualism affects moment-to-moment cognitive-control rec...

Decision-making about the expected value of an experience or behavior can explain hearing health behaviors in older adults with hearing loss. Forty-four middle-aged to older adults (68.45 ± 7.73 years) performed a task in which they were asked to decide whether information from a surgeon or an administrative assistant would be important to their he...

Correctly understood speech in difficult listening conditions is often more difficult to remember. A long-standing hypothesis for this observation is that the engagement of cognitive resources to aid speech understanding can limit resources available for memory encoding. This hypothesis is consistent with evidence that speech presented in difficult...

The Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) has long been used as a neuropsychological assessment of executive function abilities, in particular, cognitive flexibility or “set-shifting.” Recent advances in scoring the task have helped to isolate specific WCST performance metrics that index set-shifting abilities and have improved our understanding of ho...

Cognitive control refers to adjusting thoughts and actions when confronted with conflict during information processing. We tested whether this ability is causally linked to performance on certain language and memory tasks by using cognitive control training to systematically modulate people’s ability to resolve information-conflict across domains....

Significance statement: Vocabulary knowledge is resilient to widespread age-related declines in brain structure that limit other cognitive functions. We tested the hypothesis that arcuate fasciculus morphology, which supports the development of reading skills that bolster vocabulary, could explain this relative preservation. We disentangled (1) th...

This review examines findings from functional neuroimaging studies of speech recognition in noise to provide a neural systems level explanation for the effort and fatigue that can be experienced during speech recognition in challenging listening conditions. Neuroimaging studies of speech recognition consistently demonstrate that challenging listeni...

Background/study context: Adaptive control, reflected by elevated activity in cingulo-opercular brain regions, optimizes performance in challenging tasks by monitoring outcomes and adjusting behavior. For example, cingulo-opercular function benefits trial-level word recognition in noise for normal-hearing adults. Because auditory system deficits m...

How do general-purpose cognitive abilities affect language processing and comprehension? Recent research emphasises a role for cognitive control—also called executive function (EF)—when individuals must override early parsing decisions as new evidence conflicts with their developing interpretation. We tested if training on non-syntactic EF tasks im...

Conflict resolution (CR) refers to the executive function (EF) involved with regulating mental activity to resolve competing representations. During sentence processing, general-purpose CR skills may promote readers’ ability to adjust parsing decisions when new input is incompatible with one’s developing interpretation (i.e., ambiguity resolution)....

Mounting research findings demonstrate that balanced bilinguals enjoy certain cognitive advantages relative to monolinguals. On tasks requiring cognitive control (CC)—the ability to regulate mental activity and resolve among competing representations—bilinguals frequently outperform monolinguals selectively on trials inducing conflict [1]. Other ev...

Research on individual differences in sentence processing traditionally concentrates on how general cognitive traits, like working memory ability, contribute to syntactic ambiguity resolution. Recent research highlights the importance of cognitive control—primarily general conflict resolution abilities—when readers/listeners commit to an interpreta...