Rose T. Zacks's research while affiliated with Michigan State University and other places

... For example, in reading and discourse comprehension, remembering the exact wording of a sentence or a statement is usually not important for comprehension, except perhaps during school years where verbatim details (e.g., the exact dates of historical events presented in textbooks) may be tested. A more critical aspect of reading comprehension is to understand what the text was about (Kintsch, 1988;van Dijk & Kintsch, 1983), and older adults do quite well, in some cases performing better than younger adults, at encoding and retaining the meaning of a passage of text (Radvansky & Dijkstra, 2007;Radvansky et al., 1990Radvansky et al., , 2001Stine & Wingfield, 1988;Stine-Morrow et al., 2002). Related to the previous benefit we described above, if older adults attempt to remember specific details (e.g., the exact wording of a sentence), given their more limited working memory capacity, they may not be able to "hold onto" as many details of the text, potentially worsening their comprehension. ...

... The present study aimed to evaluate whether pain status, severity, and interference moderated the change in fNIRSderived HbO 2 in the PFC from single-task conditions (STW and Cognitive Interference [Alpha]) to dual-task walking conditions (DTW). Our hypothesis was that, consistent with capacity limitation theories of aging, a positive pain status, and higher pain severity and interference among people with pain, would be associated with an attenuated increase in HbO 2 from single to dual tasks [20,21]. A secondary aim was to evaluate whether pain status, severity, and interference moderated the change in cognitive accuracy (rate of correct letter generation) and stride velocity from single-to dual-task conditions. ...

... These findings may suggest that the readiness for processing interpersonal social communication, which may facilitate positive social outcomes such as social support (Albrecht et al., 1992) and social acceptance (Mallett 2007;Odom et al., 2006), could be a mechanism for promoting higher levels of well-being (Potochnick et al., 2012). There were a few negative functional connections between the attention networks and the primary sensory networks, which may be because the human brain needs to simultaneously inhibit the processing of goal-irrelevant information while focusing on goal-relevant information (Geng, 2014;Hasher et al., 2007). Moreover, the strengths of these negative functional connections were negatively correlated with well-being, which suggested that the interaction between different regions of attention and sensory networks may be associated with wellbeing through different pathways. ...

... Bruce, 1985; Poon, 1993): First, the traditional approach has resulted in remarkably few new discoveries, established principles or general theories (cf. Cohen, 1985; Zacks & Hasher, 1992). Even well-established laws -such as the superiority of meaningful (e.g., stories) over meaningless (e.g., word lists) material or the positive effects of increasing study time identify causal determinants that are so trivial that they should be obvious even to kindergarten children. ...

... Changes in cognitive control have been used to explain the development of cognitive abilities (Diamond & Gilbert, 1989;Ridderinkhof, vanderMolen, Band, & Bashore, 1997) and age-related declines in cognitive abilities (Hasher, Rypma, Stoltzfus, & Zacks, 1989). Moreover, an abundance of research illustrates that individual differences in cognitive control are related to individual differences in working memory span, reading comprehension, problem solving, general cognitive ability, and judgment and decision making (De Beni, Palladino, Pazzaglia, & Cornoldi, 1998;Dempster & Corkill, 1999;Dougherty & Hunter, 2003;Friedman & Miyake, 2004;Gernsbacher, 1993;Kane & Engle, 2002). ...

... For example, processing an interviewer's smile, eye gaze, or facial expressions may reduce the cognitive resources available for recalling or reporting the details of an event. One way we can reduce visual distractions in the environment and increase cognitive resources for the task is through inhibitory attentional mechanisms (Hasher et al., 1999(Hasher et al., , 2001)-these attentional mechanisms internally suppress goal-irrelevant features. Another more direct and perhaps less complex approach is to actively disengage from the environment by averting one's gaze (Buchanan et al., 2014;Kleider-Offutt et al., 2016;Vredeveldt et al., 2011Vredeveldt et al., , 2014. ...

... The issue of achieving a balance between computational efficiency and information selection in recurrent networks has been explored. Based on scientific studies showing that brain circuits could ignore inputs that are less relevant to the task at hand [23], a variety of skip mechanisms have been proposed to augment RNNs. Skip models, such as LSTM-jump [14], skip RNN [15] and the Leap-LSTM [13] are designed to directly skip certain inputs. ...

... However, Stoltzfus, Hasher, and Zacks (1996) have suggested that there has been a debate in the field of cognition between cognitive theorists to find the best definition for W.M. ...

... Age-related declines are commonly observed in a variety of episodic LTM tests (e.g. recognition, pairedassociate learning, free and cued recall, etc.) and often take place during the initial encoding phase (Brickman & Stern, 2009;Hasher, 2006). Similar to STM, processing speed is fundamental in explaining LTM decay in older adults (Park et al., 1996). ...

... Given the nature of nonconscious goal pursuit, it seems plausible to suggest that it recruits relatively implicit working memory, or a nonconscious executive. The idea of implicit WM (whether as a mode of operation, or as a separate mechanism) is undoubtedly foreign to the current zeitgeist in the cognitive sciences (e.g., Baars & Franklin, 2003;Baddeley, 1993;Cowan, 1999;Dudai, 2004;Gathercole, 2007;Kintsch, Healy, Hegarety, Pennington, & Salthouse, 1999;O'Reilly, Braver, & Cohen, 1999). Our data, however, are not the only data that are consistent with it. ...