Program

Attentional control, memory and intelligence are cornerstones of human higher-order cognition. Research on the neurobiological underpinnings of these fundamental cognitive functions can be approached from different directions, including experimental manipulation and inter-individual differences research. This symposium aims to integrate these perspectives, bringing together four talks that highlight different methodological approaches to assess neural correlates of higher-order cognition. The first talk will focus on the interplay of selective attention and multisensory integration in audiovisual working memory, demonstrating across two EEG studies that task-irrelevant cross-modal features are automatically encoded into working memory. The second talk investigates retroactive interference between working memory and episodic memory and shows that episodic memory representations are particularly vulnerable to interference from subsequent working memory processing when the way relevant information is probed is similar across tasks. The third presentation will examine the inter-individual differences in intelligence and its relationship to working memory capacity and neurocognitive processing speed, showing that the mental speed hypothesis cannot be generalized to WM encoding processes. The fourth talk introduces a MATLAB application that simplifies the recovery of ERP component latencies to enhance accuracy and efficiency in measuring the speed of neural mechanisms — an approach widely used in both inter-individual differences research and experimental cognitive neuroscience. Finally, we will close with an outlook on how cognitive neuroscience can inform inter-individual differences research and vice versa. Together, this symposium provides a comprehensive perspective on how diverse methodological approaches deepen our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying higher cognitive functions.