Table 4.

Cognitive behavioural tasks used in Stage 2.

Task name	Brief description	Key variables	References
Emotion expression recognition	View face and label emotion expressed (happy, sad, anger, fear, disgust, surprise) where faces are morphs along axes between emotional expressions.	Acc, RT for each emotion	Calder et al., 1996, Ekman and Friesen, 1976
Emotional memory	Study: View (positive, neutral, or negative) background image, then object image superimposed, and imagine a ‘story’ linking the two; Test (incidental): View and identify degraded image of (studied, new) object, then judge memory and confidence for visually intact image of same object, then recall valence and any details of background image from study phase.	For each valence: Priming (Acc for studied vs. new degraded objects); familiarity (Acc for item memory); recollection (Acc for background memory)	Mitchell, 1989, Fleischman, 2007, La Voie and Light, 1994, Lang et al., 1988
Emotional reactivity and regulation	View (positive, neutral, negative) film clips under instructions to simply ‘watch’ or ‘reappraise’ (attempt to reduce emotional impact by reinterpreting its meaning; for some negative films only), then rate emotional impact (how negative, positive they felt during clip) and the degree to which they successfully reappraised.	Reactivity (ratings for ‘watch’ trials: positive vs. neutral; negative vs. neutral); regulation (ratings for ‘reappraise’ negative vs. ‘watch’ negative)	Dalgleish, 2004, Mather, 2012, Mather and Carstensen, 2005
Face recognition: familiar faces	View faces of famous people (and some unknown foils), judge whether each is familiar, and if so, what is known about the person (occupation, nationality, origin of fame, etc.), then attempt to provide person's name.	Acc (identifying information or full name given) as a proportion of number of faces recognised as familiar, subtracting false alarms (unknown faces given ‘familiar’ response)	Germine and Hooker, 2011, Bartlett and Leslie, 1986
Face recognition: unfamiliar faces	Given a target image of a face, identify same individual in an array of 6 face images (with possible changes in head orientation and lighting between target and same face in the test array)	Acc	Benton et al., 1983, Levin et al., 1975
Fluid intelligence	Complete nonverbal puzzles involving series completion, classification, matrices, and conditions.	Acc on each of 4 subtests	Cattell, 1971; Testing IfPaA, 1973, Kievit et al., 2014
Force matching	Match mechanical force applied to left index finger by using right index finger either directly, pressing a lever which transmits force to left index finger, or indirectly, by moving a slider which adjusts the force transmitted to the left index finger.	Average difference between target force and matched force applied by participant via (direct, indirect) means
Hotel task	Perform tasks in role of hotel manager: write customer bills, sort money, proofread advert, sort playing cards, alphabetise list of names. Total time must be allocated equally between tasks; there is not enough time to complete any one task.	Number of tasks attempted, deviation from optimal time allocation	Shallice and Burgess, 1991, Kievit et al., 2014
Motor learning	Time-pressured movement of a cursor to a target by moving an (occluded) stylus under veridical, perturbed (30°), and reset (veridical again) mappings between visual and real space.	RT (movement time to hit target), trajectory error (angle) across phases
Picture-picture priming	Name the pictured object presented alone (baseline), then when preceded by a prime object that is phonologically related (one, two initial phonemes), semantically related (low, high relatedness), or unrelated.	Acc, RT, priming effects (RT of each condition vs. baseline)
Proverb comprehension	Read and interpret three English proverbs.	Sum of response ratings (1 = incorrect or “don't know”, 2 = partly correct but literal, 3 = correct and abstract)	Hodges, 1994
Sentence comprehension	Listen to and judge grammatical acceptability of partial sentences, beginning with an (ambiguous, unambiguous) sentence stem (e.g., “Tom noticed that landing planes…”) followed by a disambiguating continuation word (e.g., “are”) in a different voice. Ambiguity is either semantic or syntactic, with empirically determined dominant and subordinate interpretations.	RT, proportion of “unacceptable” responses in each condition	Rodd et al., 2010, Tyler et al., 2011
Tip-of-the-tongue task	View faces of famous people (actors, musicians, politicians, etc.) and respond with the person's name, or “don't know” if they do not know the person's name (even if familiar), or “TOT” if they know the person's name but are (temporarily) unable to retrieve it.	Proportion of responses of each type; incorrect “Know” responses; partial information responses (e.g., occupation)	Lovelace and Twohig, 1990, Reese et al., 1999
Visual short-term memory	View (1–4) coloured discs briefly presented on a computer screen, then after a delay, attempt to remember the colour of the disc that was at a cued location, with response indicated by selecting the colour on a colour wheel (touchscreen input).	Parameters of model fitted to error distribution: VSTM capacity (k), precision, probability of reporting an un-cued item	Zhang and Luck, 2008

Notes. Acc = accuracy; RT = response times.