John Jonides's research while affiliated with University of Michigan and other places

Publications (279)

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People differ substantially in their vulnerability to distraction. Yet, many types of distractions exist, from external stimulation to internal thoughts. How should we characterize individual differences in their distractibility? Two samples of adult participants (total N = 1220) completed a large battery of questionnaires assessing different facet...
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Introduction Adults with Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) are generally distractible. Yet, the precise relationship between ADHD and distractibility remains under-specified in two respects. First, different sources of distraction, such as background noise or mind wandering, may not be equally associated with ADHD. Second, ADHD itself...
Preprint
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In situations where the features of distracting information are unpredictable, effective visual search often relies on the ability to reactively disengage from distraction after initial capture. The current study examined whether adults with and without Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) differed in their ability to reactively reject a...
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Despite long-standing concerns about the use of free reaction times (RTs) in cognitive psychology, they remain a prevalent measure of conflict resolution. This report presents the forced-response method as a fresh approach to examine speed-accuracy tradeoff functions (SATs) in conflict tasks. The method involves fixing the overall response time, va...
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The current study examined if mind-wandering is associated with deficits in visual search performance, particularly the ability to ignore salient distractors. In a visual search task, participants searched for a fixed target among heterogeneous items while a salient distractor appeared on half of the trials. Thought probes were presented after a su...
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Working Memory (WM) training has shown promise in supporting cognitive functioning in older adult populations, but effects that generalize beyond the trained task have been inconsistent. Targeting cognitive processes in isolation might be a limiting factor given that metacognitive and motivational factors have been shown to impact older adults’ eng...
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On April 13, 2021, the CDC announced that the administration of Johnson and Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine would be paused due to a rare blood clotting side effect in ~ 0.0001% of people given the vaccine. Most people who are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine list potential side effects as their main concern (PEW, 2021); thus, it is likely that this a...
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Resting-state functional connectivity (rsFC) has been used to assess the effect of vision loss on brain plasticity. With the emergence of vision restoration therapies, rsFC analysis provides a means to assess the functional changes following sight restoration. Our study demonstrates a partial reversal of blindness-induced rsFC changes in Argus II r...
Preprint
People differ substantially in their vulnerability to distraction. Yet, distraction can occur for various reasons, such as external interference, thought intrusions, repetitive negative thoughts, and mind-wandering. How are these different forms of distraction related to each other? Is there a group of people who are successful at resisting all for...
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Across three experiments (N = 1565), we investigated how forecasts about the spread of COVID 19 are impacted by data trends, and whether patterns of misestimation predict adherence to social-distancing guidelines. We also investigated how mode of data presentation influences forecasting of future cases by showing participants data on the number of...
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Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a noninvasive form of electrical brain stimulation popularly used to augment the effects of working memory (WM) training. Although success has been mixed, some studies report enhancements in WM performance persisting days, weeks, or even months that are actually more reminiscent of consolidation eff...
Preprint
On April 13, 2021, the CDC announced that the administration of Johnson and Johnson’s COVID-19 vaccine would be paused due to a rare blood clotting side effect in ~0.0001% of people given the vaccine. Most people who are hesitant to get a COVID-19 vaccine list potential side effects as their main concern (PEW, 2021); thus, it is likely that this an...
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We suggest that consideration of trial-by-trial variations, individual differences, and training data will enrich the current framework in Luck, S. J., Gaspelin, N., Folk, C. L., Remington, R. W., & Theeuwes, J. (2020. Progress toward resolving the attentional capture debate. Visual Cognition, 1–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/13506285.2020.1848949). W...
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We suggest that consideration of trial-by-trial variations, individual differences, and training data will enrich the current framework in Luck et al. (2020). We consider whether attentional capture is modulated by trial-by-trial fluctuations of attentional state and experiences on the previous trial. We also consider whether individual differences...
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Our ability to maintain focus on a task waxes and wanes. Recent research suggests that eye-tracking may be a useful tool to capture the momentary slips of attention. In this paper, we show that pre-trial gaze stability predicted momentary slips of attention on the upcoming trial. In two visual search tasks, we asked participants to stabilize their...
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Demanding cognitive functions like working memory (WM) depend on functional brain networks being able to communicate efficiently while also maintaining some degree of modularity. Evidence suggests that aging can disrupt this balance between integration and modularity. In this study, we examined how cognitive training affects the integration and mod...
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Research investigating transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to enhance cognitive training augments both our understanding of its long‐term effects on cognitive plasticity as well as potential applications to strengthen cognitive interventions. Previous work has demonstrated enhancement of working memory training while applying concurrent...
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Understanding the concept of “flattening the curve” in connection with the COVID-19 crisis requires an understanding of which curve needs to be flattened – but how well do ordinary Americans understand the relationship between the various curves presented in the media? Based on prior research, we hypothesized that ordinary Americans will have diffi...
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Within a relatively short time span, social media have transformed the way humans interact, leading many to wonder what, if any, implications this interactive revolution has had for people’s emotional lives. Over the past 15 years, an explosion of research has examined this issue, generating countless studies and heated debate. Although early resea...
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Research indicates that a subtle shift in language—silently referring to oneself using one’s own name and non–first-person-singular pronouns (i.e., distanced self-talk)—promotes emotion regulation. Yet it remains unclear whether the efficacy of distanced self-talk depends on the intensity of the negative experience reflected on and whether the bene...
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Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) treats neuropsychiatric disorders, but effects of stimulation are highly state-dependent and in most therapeutic applications, mental state is not controlled. This exploratory proposal will test the broad hypothesis that when TMS, specifically intermittent theta burst stimulation (iTBS), is applied during a c...
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Across multiple experiments, we found that Americans misestimated the growth of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. and that these estimates were in turn related to people’s forecasts of the duration of social distancing orders, and their own future adherence to these orders. We also investigated how mode of data presentation influences forecasting of futur...
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Brain activity typically increases with increasing working memory (WM) load, regardless of age, before reaching an apparent ceiling. However, older adults exhibit greater brain activity and reach ceiling at lower loads than younger adults, possibly reflecting compensation at lower loads and dysfunction at higher loads. We hypothesized that WM train...
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Socioeconomic disadvantage during childhood is associated with a myriad of negative adult outcomes. One mechanism through which disadvantage undermines positive outcomes may be by disrupting the development of self-control. The goal of the present study was to examine pathways from three key indicators of socioeconomic disadvantage - low family inc...
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Brain activity typically increases with increasing working memory (WM) load, regardless of age, before reaching an apparent ceiling. However, older adults exhibit greater brain activity and reach ceiling at lower loads than younger adults, possibly reflecting compensation at lower loads and dysfunction at higher loads. We hypothesized that WM train...
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Proactive control is the ability to manipulate and maintain goal-relevant information within working memory (WM), allowing individuals to selectively attend to important information while inhibiting irrelevant distractions. Deficits in proactive control may cause multiple cognitive impairments seen in schizophrenia. However, studies of cognitive co...
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Objective: The majority of the population will experience some cognitive decline with age. Therefore, the development of effective interventions to mitigate age-related decline is critical for older adults' cognitive functioning and their quality of life. Methods: In our randomized controlled multi-site trial, we target participants' working mem...
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Interactions with natural environments and nature-related stimuli have been found to be beneficial to cognitive performance, in particular on executive cognitive tasks with high demands on directed attention processes. However, results vary across different studies. The aim of the present paper was to evaluate the effects of nature vs. urban enviro...
Preprint
Proactive control is the ability to manipulate and maintain goal-relevant information within working memory (WM), allowing individuals to selectively attend to important information while inhibiting irrelevant distractions. Deficits in proactive control may cause multiple cognitive impairments seen in schizophrenia. However, studies of cognitive co...
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Background: Patients with heart failure (HF) are at risk of cognitive dysfunction, including decreased directed attention. Directed attention is critical for performing daily activities including HF self-care by facilitating one to follow instructions or train-of-thought when there are interferences in which presented stimuli are in conflict with...
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Recent work has established the possibility that messaging and incentive during recruitment may influence the outcome of cognitive training. These factors may impact intrinsic and extrinsic motivation to complete a training intervention, and one provocative single session study suggests that recruitment messaging may be responsible for an expectanc...
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A growing body of literature demonstrating the malleability of critical higher-order cognitive functions by means of targeted interventions has incited widespread scientific interest, most notably in the form of cognitive training programs. The results are mixed and a point of contention: It has been argued that gains observed in cognitive training...
Preprint
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Interactions with natural environments and nature-related stimuli have been found to be beneficial to cognitive performance, in particular on executive cognitive tasks with high demands on directed attention processes. However, results vary across different studies.The aim of the present study was to perform a meta-analysis of all our published and...
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Psychologists have long debated whether it is possible to assess how people subjectively feel without asking them. The recent proliferation of online social networks has recently added a fresh chapter to this discussion, with research now suggesting that it is possible to index people’s subjective experience of emotion by simply counting the number...
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Growing evidence suggests that healthy aging affects the configuration of large-scale functional brain networks. This includes reducing network modularity and local efficiency. However, the stability of these effects over time and their potential role in learning remain poorly understood. The goal of the present study was to further clarify previou...
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Previous research has demonstrated that adaptive training of working memory can substantially increase performance on the trained task. Such training effects have been reported for performance on simple span tasks, complex span tasks, and n-back tasks. Another task that has become a popular vehicle for studying working memory is the change-detectio...
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Does silently talking to yourself in the third-person constitute a relatively effortless form of self control? We hypothesized that it does under the premise that third-person self-talk leads people to think about the self similar to how they think about others, which provides them with the psychological distance needed to facilitate self control....
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Background: During the fall of 2014, the threat of an Ebola outbreak gripped the United States (Poll, 8-12 October 2014; see Harvard School of Public Health & SSRS, 2014), creating a unique opportunity to advance basic knowledge concerning how emotion regulation works in consequential contexts and translate existing research in this area to inform...
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Les réseaux sociaux ont rapidement changé la façon dont les gens interagissent entre eux. Le réseau social le plus populaire est Facebook, avec un nombre croissant de personnes qui consacrent de plus en plus de temps sur ce site chaque jour. Dans cet article, nous discutons de l’impact de l’utilisation de Facebook sur le bonheur. La revue de littér...
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A great deal of interest surrounds the use of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to augment cognitive training. However, effects are inconsistent across studies, and meta-analytic evidence is mixed, especially within healthy, young adults. One major source of this inconsistency is individual differences among the participants, but these...
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Social network sites are ubiquitous and now constitute a common tool people use to interact with one another in daily life. Here we review the consequences of interacting with social network sites for subjective well-being—that is, how people feel moment-to-moment and how satisfied they are with their lives. We begin by clarifying the constructs th...
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Working memory (WM) is a cognitive system responsible for actively maintaining and processing relevant information and is central to successful cognition. A process critical to WM is the resolution of proactive interference (PI), which involves suppressing memory intrusions from prior memories that are no longer relevant. Most studies that have exa...
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Background: In heart failure (HF), attention may be decreased because of lowered cerebral blood flow and increased attentional demands needed for self-care. Objective: Guided by the Attention Restoration Theory, the objective was to test the efficacy of the natural restorative environment (NRE) intervention on improving attention and mood among...
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Working memory (WM) is a fundamental cognitive ability that supports complex thought but is limited in capacity. Thus, WM training interventions have become very popular as a means of potentially improving WM-related skills. Another promising intervention that has gained increasing traction in recent years is transcranial direct current stimulation...
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Objective: Declines in working memory are a ubiquitous finding within the cognitive-aging literature. A unitary inhibitory selection mechanism that serves to guide attention towards task-relevant information and resolve interference from task-irrelevant information has been proposed to underlie such deficits. However, inhibition can occur at multip...
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Introduction: Attention is critical to performing self-care and is impaired in 25% of patients with heart failure (HF). Although HF patients may have greater attentional demands from their chronic condition, reasons for their impaired attention have included altered oxygenation to the brain, but not mental effort. Purpose: To compare attention betw...
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Depression is consistently associated with biased retrieval and interpretation of affective stimuli, but evidence for depressive bias in earlier cognitive processing, such as attention, is mixed. In five separate experiments, individuals with depression (three experiments with clinically diagnosed major depression, two experiments with dysphoria me...
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Significance We show that the functional coordination between the two hemispheres of the brain is maintained by strong and stable interactions of a specific subset of connections between homotopic regions. Our data suggest that the stability of those functional interactions is mediated in part by the direct anatomical projections of large, highly m...
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Previous research has shown that viewing images of nature scenes can have a beneficial effect on memory, attention, and mood. In this study, we aimed to determine whether the preference of natural versus man-made scenes is driven by bottom-up processing of the low-level visual features of nature. We used participants' ratings of perceived naturalne...
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Investigators have begun to document links between emotional clarity and forms of negative emotionality, including neuroticism and major depressive disorder (MDD). Researchers to date have relied almost exclusively on global self-reports of emotional clarity; moreover, no studies have examined emotional clarity as a function of valence, although th...
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Major depressive disorder (MDD) is a prevalent disorder involving disturbances in mood. There is still much to understand regarding precisely how emotions are disrupted in individuals with MDD. In this study, we used a network approach to examine the emotional disturbances underlying MDD. We hypothesized that compared with healthy control individua...
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Prior research indicates that Facebook usage predicts declines in subjective well-being over time. How does this come about? We examined this issue in 2 studies using experimental and field methods. In Study 1, cueing people in the laboratory to use Facebook passively (rather than actively) led to declines in affective well-being over time. Study 2...
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Previous research has shown that interacting with natural environments vs. more urban or built environments can have salubrious psychological effects, such as improvements in attention and memory. Even viewing pictures of nature vs. pictures of built environments can produce similar effects. A major question is: What is it about natural environment...
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Functional brain networks emerge and dissipate over a primarily static anatomical foundation. The dynamic basis of these networks is inter-regional communication involving local and distal regions. It is assumed that inter-regional distances play a pivotal role in modulating network dynamics. Using three different neuroimaging modalities, 6 dataset...
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Short-term memory (STM), the brief maintenance of information in the absence of external stimulation, is central to higher-level cognition. Behavioral and neural data indicate that information maintained in STM can be represented in qualitatively distinct states. These states include a single chunk held in the focus of attention available for immed...
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The 2014 Tanner Symposium features a panel of speakers discussing current research in the areas of volition and self-control and the effects of that research for issues of public policy.
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A recent wave of studies-more than 100 conducted over the last decade-has shown that exerting effort at controlling impulses or behavioral tendencies leaves a person depleted and less able to engage in subsequent rounds of regulation. Regulatory depletion is thought to play an important role in everyday problems (e.g., excessive spending, overeatin...
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Distinctive cortico-striatal circuits that serve motor and cognitive functions have been recently mapped based on resting-state connectivity (Di Martino et al., 2008). It has been reported that age differences in cortico-striatal connectivity relate to cognitive declines in aging (Ystad et al., 2011). Moreover, children in their early teens (i.e.,...
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Working memory training has been the focus of intense research interest. Despite accumulating behavioral work, knowledge about the neural mechanisms underlying training effects is scarce. Here, we show that 7 days of training on an n-back task led to substantial performance improvements in the trained task; furthermore, the experimental group showe...
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Total masking of a colored disk in the Werner disk-ring paradigm was found to be a function of the interaction between its color and the color of the ring that followed it. Suppression occurred most frequently when disk and ring hues were identical, least often when complementary hues were paired, and with intermediate frequency when hues were diff...
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The ability to hold information briefly in mind in the absence of external stimulation forms the core of much of higher-order cognition. This ability is referred to as short-term memory (STM). However, single-term labels such as this belie the complexity of the underlying construct. Here, we review evidence that STM is an amalgamation of three qual...
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Schematic faces, scrambled faces (stimuli differing from schematic faces in that the positions of the eyes, noses, and mouths were anomalous, but constant from trial to trial), and individual face components were presented in a tachistoscope followed by a patterned mask. Following the mask, either four alternative mouths or four alternative pairs o...
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Working memory (WM) training has recently become a topic of intense interest and controversy. Although several recent studies have reported near- and far-transfer effects as a result of training WM-related skills, others have failed to show far transfer, suggesting that generalization effects are elusive. Also, many of the earlier intervention atte...
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Over 500 million people interact daily with Facebook. Yet, whether Facebook use influences subjective well-being over time is unknown. We addressed this issue using experience-sampling, the most reliable method for measuring in-vivo behavior and psychological experience. We text-messaged people five times per day for two-weeks to examine how Facebo...