Bilingualism, aging, and cognitive control: evidence from the Simon task.

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Abstract

Previous work has shown that bilingualism is associated with more effective controlled processing in children; the assumption is that the constant management of 2 competing languages enhances executive functions (E. Bialystok, 2001). The present research attempted to determine whether this bilingual advantage persists for adults and whether bilingualism attenuates the negative effects of aging on cognitive control in older adults. Three studies are reported that compared the performance of monolingual and bilingual middle-aged and older adults on the Simon task. Bilingualism was associated with smaller Simon effect costs for both age groups; bilingual participants also responded more rapidly to conditions that placed greater demands on working memory. In all cases the bilingual advantage was greater for older participants. It appears, therefore, that controlled processing is carried out more effectively by bilinguals and that bilingualism helps to offset age-related losses in certain executive processes.

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The influence of irrelevant location information on performance: A review of the Simon and spatial Stroop effects.

C. H. Lu, R W Proctor (1995)

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of irrelevant location information on performance of visual choice-reaction tasks. We review empirical findings and theoretical explanations from two domains, those of the Simon effect and the spatial Stroop effect, in which stimulus location has been shown to affect reaction time when irrelevant to the task. We then integrate the findings and explanations from the two domains to clarify how and why stimulus location influences performance even when it is uninformative to the correct response. Factors that influence the processing of irrelevant location information include response modality, relative timing with respect to the relevant information, spatial coding, and allocation of attention. The most promising accounts are offered by models in which response selection is a function of (1) strength of association of the irrelevant stimulus information with the response and (2) temporal overlap of the resulting response activation with that produced by the relevant stimulus information.