Intellectual performance and ego depletion: role of the self in logical reasoning and other information processing.

Some complex thinking requires active guidance by the self, but simpler mental activities do not. Depletion of the self's regulatory resources should therefore impair the former and not the latter. Resource depletion was manipulated by having some participants initially regulate attention (Studies 1 and 3) or emotion (Study 2). As compared with no-regulation participants who did not perform such exercises, depleted participants performed worse at logic and reasoning (Study 1), cognitive extrapolation (Study 2), and a test of thoughtful reading comprehension (Study 3). The same manipulations failed to cause decrements on a test of general knowledge (Study 2) or on memorization and recall of nonsense syllables (Study 3). Successful performance at complex thinking may therefore rely on limited regulatory resources.

• Publication year

  2003

• Venue

  Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

• Publication date

  2003-07-01

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1037/0022-3514.85.1.33PMID 12872883
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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