Different stages of information processing

JUAN E KAMIENKOWSKI; MILENA WINOGRAD; SANDRA VANOTTI; M LAURA SALADINO; FERNANDO CACERES; MARIANO SIGMAN

Buenos Aires, Argentina

Congreso; International Neuropsychological Society 2008 Mid-Year Meeting; 2008

When two tasks are presented simultaneously or at a short stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), a systematic delay in the execution of the second task is observed while response times (RT) to the first task are unaffected. This phenomenon, referred as Psychological Refractory Period (PRP), has been widely used in normal subjects to understand the temporal organization of different stages of information processing. Basically, it was shown that information processing consists in three principal stages. The first one is the perceptual phase, in which the sensory stimuli are decoded. This stage is processed in parallel (two different tasks can be processed simultaneously). The second phase is the central one, and it consist in the integration of the information and decision making. This phase has a serial nature (two different stimuli can not be processed simultaneously). The last stage in information processing is the motor phase and it can also occur in parallel as the perceptual one. Appart of these three main phases, information processing also involves active stages such as the “task setting” and “task disengaging”. In this talk, we will explain all the experiments that give rise to these ideas and we will also speak about other paradigms to study information processing. Also, we will show some findings in neurological patients with disabilities in some stages of information processing.