Erik M. Altmann

TL;DR: The goal-activation model presented here analyzes goal-directed cognition in terms of the general memory constructs of activation and associative priming, and implications for understanding intention superiority, postcompletion error, and effects of task interruption are discussed.

TL;DR: The results support the task analysis of interruption and the model of memory for goals, and suggest further means for studying operator performance in dynamic task environments.

TL;DR: A model of cognitive control in task switching is developed in which controlled performance depends on the system maintaining access to a code in episodic memory representing the most recently cued task, suggesting that episodic task codes play an important role in keeping the cognitive system focused under a variety of performance constraints.

TL;DR: The authors showed that deliberate practice is not sufficient to explain individual differences in performance in the two most widely studied domains in expertise research (chess and music) and proposed a theoretical framework that takes into account several potentially relevant explanatory constructs.

TL;DR: Behavioral predictions of functional decay theory were tested in a task-switching paradigm in which memory for the current task had to be updated every few seconds, hundreds of times, and reaction times and error rates both increased gradually between updates, reflecting decay of memory forThe theory posits that when an attribute must be updated frequently in memory, its current value decays to prevent interference with later values.