reaction time

This research investigated the effect of insomnia caused by military guarding on motor performance and salivary cortisol and testosterone concentration. Some 24 male active-duty soldiers were randomly selected and placed in two groups, insomnia, and control. Insomnia consisted of two hours of guarding with military equipment, two hours of on-call, and two hours of sleep, which started at 4:00 PM and lasted until 6:00 AM the next day. Agility, balance, and reaction time were measured as indicators of motor performance. Saliva samples were collected in the morning two days before, in the morning after applying insomnia, and after measuring motor performance. The results showed that agility performance in the insomnia group was weaker than in the control group. The balance performance of the insomnia group did not differ significantly from the control group. The reaction time in the experimental group was slower when compared to the control group. Although the reaction time was affected significantly, the findings of this research showed that salivary cortisol and testosterone concentration, as well as agility and balance, are not affected by this amount/type of sleep deprivation.

This study aimed to determine the effectiveness of Gagne’s model of instructional design on the attention and working memory capacity of students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This study adopted a quasi-experimental design with pretest-posttest and a control group. The statistical population of the current research consisted of all fifth-grade female students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in Tabriz in the academic year 2021-2022. In this study, 30 students with attention problems (scores higher than 72 in the Connors Parent Questionnaire) were selected as the sample and randomly assigned to the experimental and control groups. The experimental group underwent eight training sessions, four sessions per week, each for 30 minutes, using the Gagne’s training model while the control group did not receive any training. It should be mentioned that the computer version of the selective and divided attention and working memory tests were used to collect data. The data were analyzed using multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) and SPSS 22 software. The results showed that Gagne’s model of instructional design is effective in increasing divided attention (P <0.048), selective attention (P <0.018), reducing reaction time (P <0.009), and increasing working memory capacity (P <0.047) in students with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. Therefore, it is suggested that the content of courses requiring great attention and concentration be designed using Gagne’s model of instructional design and presented to students in order to increase the amount of divided attention , selective attention and working memory capacity and reduce reaction time.

Due to both experimental and theoretical controversies on semantic relatedness research in second/foreign language (L2) education, the present study provides an alternative approach by investigating English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners’ cognitive processing of semantically related and unrelated words. The participants were 38 Iranian EFL learners from upper intermediate classes at a private language teaching school. Employing a semantic priming experiment, the EFL learners saw a pair of words, and were asked to decide whether or not the target word (i.e. an adjective) was related in meaning to the preceding word (i.e. a noun). A two-way Repeated Measure ANOVA was run on reaction time (RT) and error rate (ER) data. Results of the study showed that semantically related words induced faster RTs than semantically unrelated ones, confirming the positive effect of the semantic relatedness in cognitive processing of L2 words. However, higher ERs in related conditions in comparison to unrelated conditions refer to a kind of confusion on the part of EFL learners.