Objective: The Fist-Edge-Palm task is a motor sequencing task believed to be sensitive to frontal lobe impairment. The present study aimed to investigate the inhibitory processes underlying successful execution of this task.Method: Seventy-two healthy participants were asked to perform the Fist-Edge-Palm task paced at 120bpms, 60bpms and self-paced. They also completed assessments sensitive to recently dissociated forms of inhibition (the Hayling Sentence Completion Test and the Stroop Colour-Word Test) that have recently been shown to be differentially lateralised (the right and left Prefrontal Cortex, respectively), and Cattell's Culture Fair Intelligence test. Results: Analysis revealed that performance on the Hayling Sentence CompletionTest predicted the amount of crude errors and the overall score on the Fist-Edge-Palm task, and that pacing condition had no effect on this outcome. Neither the Stroop Colour-Word Test nor Cattell's Culture Fair Intelligence Test predicted performance on the Fist-Edge-Palm task.Conclusions: Consistent with some previous neuroimaging findings, the present findings suggest that Fist-Edge-Palm task performance relies on right lateralised inhibitory processes.

This study compares the restorative effects on directed attention functioning following exposure to natural landscape images versus scrambled/distorted landscape images. Attention restoration theory (ART) provides an analysis of the stimuli and environment required for restoration of cognitive fatigue. According to ART, nature employs attention through a bottom-up process in which intrinsically fascinating stimuli from the natural environment itself modestly dominate attention. This allows the mechanisms responsible for top-down processing, which is necessary for directed attention, to recover and replenish. Unlike natural environments, urban environments employ attention through bottom-up stimulation, which forces one to overcome the stimulation using directed attention, thus not allowing for the recovery of directed attention mechanisms. This study looks into whether solely visual stimulation of natural environments is adequate for the restoration of directed attention mechanisms as measured with the “Attention Test” application. The mean completion time on the Attention Test game was significantly lower in the nature image group (M = 54.33) when compared to the scrambled image group (M = 62.04), thus validating the visual aspect of ART.