Some causal factors in mental blocking.

Mental Set and Mental Shift Revisited

“…A second possible source of interference on the pure lists derives from the work of Bills and Robinson (Bills, 1931(Bills, , 1935a(Bills, , 1935bRobinson and Bills, 1926), who suggested that homogeneous (pure) lists are more likely to suffer 'mental blocks.' They defined a mental block as a temporary stop in a continuous task and, using tasks such as continuously writing or saying 'ababab...' or 'abcdefabcdef...,' found that as task homogeneity and response competition increased, so did the tendency toward more frequent and longer mental blocks.…”

Involuntary Rest Pauses (Irps) in Schizophrenics and Normals

“…A well-known phenomenon which has been attributed to the effects of reactive inhibition is "blocking" (Bills, 1931(Bills, , 1935, i.e., the occurrence of involuntary rest pauses (IRPs) during the performance of a motor or perceptual task using massed practice; these are indexed in terms of prolonged reaction times or other suitable response decrement falling outside the normal curve of errors ( Eysenck, 1965( Eysenck, , 1967. While some phenomena attributed to reactive inhibition are explicable also by alternative theories (e.g., consolidation), it is unlikely that these account better for the blocking phenomenon.…”

Phone Conversation while Processing Information: Chronometric Analysis of Load Effects in Everyday-media Multitasking

“…This distributional asymmetry is due to the fact that there is fundamental limit to maximizing response speed but none to response slowing. For example, the classic work of Bills (1931 , 1935 ) devoted particular attention to the occurrence of incidental extra-long responses (which he termed “mental blocks”) after periods of normal work speed in self-paced color naming. Crucially, it is not a matter of the scale properties (i.e., being finite toward the left but infinite toward the right), as occasionally stated in the literature, but because of a limitation in the speed of processing even when performed with maximum mental efficiency ( Steinborn et al, 2016b ).…”