The court decision on keeping secret the names of those offering their advice to Vice President Dick Cheney's energy task force (front page, May 11), a group so secret that its membership, not to mention deliberations, have to be kept under wraps, makes Mr. Cheney's effort a task farce.
General Sanchez has been criticized by some current and retired officers for failing to recognize the growing insurgency in Iraq during his year in command and for failing to put together a plan to unify the disparate military effort, a task that was finally carried out when his successor, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., took over in mid-2004.
Several studies have shown that expending effort on a task seems to commit us to it.
People with "low need for cognition" expend less cognitive effort on a task than those with "high need for cognition" (Verplanken 1993).
At the same time, another group of brain regions that is usually lively when a person is sustaining effort on a task began toning down.
The international team of researchers suspects this abnormal behavior is the result of the brain attempting to save effort on a task.
Infants and toddlers between 6 and 36 months of age may be the most challenging population for obtaining systematic and reliable behavioral data using paradigms that require the child to sustain attention, follow directions, and direct their cognitive effort toward a task that requires adherence to a somewhat rigid protocol.
In the first fMRI paradigm we will investigate effort perception during an effort task, using a MR-compatible handgrip device.
Thus we hypothesize that increased cognitive effort during a task-block might lead to stronger subsequent processes of self-evaluation and reflection of preceding events resulting in increased activation of the DMN.
Their effort has been a task akin to building the pyramids, but the results are stunning; the faucets now work in one of the most arid and isolated spots on the planet thanks to an ingenious system of pipes that connects to a spring at the bottom of an old mine shaft.
