title: Difficulty matters: unspecific attentional demands as a major determinant of performance highlighted by clinical studies.
abstract: The cognitive impairments shown by brain-damaged patients emphasize the role of task difficulty as a major determinant for performance. We discuss the proposal of Kurzban et al. in light of our findings on right-hemisphere-damaged patients, who show increasing awareness deficits for the contralesional hemispace when engaged with resource-consuming dual tasks. This phenomenon is readily explained by the assumption of unspecific depletable resources.
authors.affiliation: Computational Cognitive Neuroscience Lab, Department of General Psychology, University of Padova, 35131 Padova, Italy. mario.bonato@ugent.be marco.zorzi@unipd.it carlo.umilta@unipd.it http://ccnl.psy.unipd.it/
authors.forename: Mario
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Bonato
authors.forename: Marco
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zorzi
authors.forename: Carlo
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Umiltà
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D005222:Mental Fatigue / Q000523:psychology*; D008960:Models, Psychological