Individual differences in the functional neuroanatomy of verbal discrimination learning revealed by positron emission tomography

Why do some people have better memory abilities than others? This issue has been of long-standing interest to scientists and lay people. However, using purely behavioral methods, psychologists have made little progress in illuminating it. Now that functional brain imaging techniques have become available to study mind/brain relations, there is a new promise of understanding individual differences in learning and memory in terms of corresponding differences in brain activity. In this paper, we will present a positron emission tomography (PET) study designed to examine individual differences in learning and memory abilities. The basic assumption is that different patterns of brain activity serve as strong predictors of memory performance. Two specific questions were addressed in this study: (i) Can PET illuminate the relations between memory processes and their neuroanatomical correlates among individual learners and rememberers? and (ii) if so, how are these relations affected by the stage of practice on a given memory task? Our PET study examined individual differences in the neuroanatomical correlates of multi-trial verbal discrimination learning in 16 young healthy subjects. The results identified patterns of brain regions in which blood flow correlated with subjects' retrieval performance. However, these regions did not correlate with performance during all learning trials. Instead, a gradual shift was observed from one pattern of brain regions to another over the course of learning. These results suggest that individual differences in memory performance are related to differences in neural activity within specific brain circuits.     

Rethinking Collaborative Learning Through Participation in an Interdisciplinary Research Project: Tensions and Negotiations as Key Points in Knowledge Production

As social and cultural psychologists of learning, we are persuaded of the crucial role of interaction in development and learning. But how do we experience this assumption in our own research practices and in our collaboration with colleagues? Taking as our object of study our own participation in a European Research and Development project that aimed to enhance interactive and argumentative skills in learning settings, this study shows how collaboration among project partners is not something that is to be taken for granted, but something that is elaborated and evolves in time, takes diverse forms, and is mediated by multiple tools. The psychological processes—more particularly tensions and negotiation—involved in collaboration are developed and discussed. The study explores the processes of establishing collaboration and, through the analysis of specific zones of tensions, sheds light on the way new knowledge (on how to do research, how to communicate, how to work together) is constructed. It contributes to the understanding of the issues and conditions for the development of a community of practice.     

Representation and learning in motor action – Bridges between experimental research and cognitive robotics

To gain a better understanding of the functionality of representation and categorization in action and interaction, it is fundamental that researchers understand how movements are represented in long-term memory. It is our position that human motor control requires that our actions be planned and represented in terms of intended perceptual effects and future task demands, and that the individual has a well-structured mental representation of the task so that the movement can be carried out successfully. Basic Action Concepts (BACs) are identified as major building blocks of cognitive representation in long-term memory, which are cognitive tools used to master the functional demands of movement tasks. In this paper, we consider relevant issues in research methodology and present an experimental method that can be used to assess action-relevant representational structures. This method permits us to observe the strong relationship between cognitive representation and performance in manual action. For example, the specific differences in the mental representations of participants are strongly related to skill level, as well as biomechanical and task constraints. We then discuss results from our learning experiments, where we have examined the development and changes in cognitive representation over time. From these experiments we have found that cognitive reference structures include task-specific spatial information, which provides the basis for action control in skilled voluntary movement. We have implemented these results on various robotic platforms. We argue that the insights gained from various experimental approaches in the field of cognitive psychology and motor control enable researchers to explore the possibilities and limitations of artificial control architectures in robot systems. Finally, we argue that this is not a unidirectional process. Researchers from the field of cognitive psychology and motor control can profit from the advances in technological systems, which enhance the understanding of human motor control in skilled voluntary action.     

Neuromarketing as a scale validation tool: Understanding individual differences based on the style of processing scale in affective judgements

This paper revisits a well-cited and widely applied consumer scale, Style of Processing (SOP) (Childers et al., Journal of Consumer Research, 1985, 12 , 125), that has been used to investigate individual differences in processing visual versus verbal information in marketing. The scale has advanced knowledge in fields related to marketing communications, product development, psychology, advertising, education and learning theories, shedding light on our understanding of consumer psychology related to persuasion, comprehension, memory, and other consumer cognitive processes involving information. In a research dialog that took place in 2008, a need for further SOP validation was suggested using a neuromarketing approach. We took this call forward and conducted an event-related-potential (ERP) experimental research study using electroencephalogram (EEG) to validate the SOP scale, focusing on differential affective processing between verbalizers and visualizers. We not only demonstrate how neuromarketing tools can be utilized to provide evidence for scale validity, providing advantages over self-reported measures; but more importantly, address issues related to understanding differential fluency effects that exist between visualizers and verbalizers. Behavioral data revealed varying reaction times to emotional stimuli of a pictorial nature. We further identify two ERP components in our data, early left anterior negativity (ELAN) and late negative slow wave (LNSW), that differentiate individual processing fluency in affective versus evaluative-based judgements. Findings confirmed the construct validity of the SOP scale and enhance our understanding of individual differences in emotional processing of pictorial information.     

Modeling the Covariance Structure of Complex Datasets Using Cognitive Models: An Application to Individual Differences and the Heritability of Cognitive Ability

Understanding individual differences in cognitive performance is an important part of understanding how variations in underlying cognitive processes can result in variations in task performance. However, the exploration of individual differences in the components of the decision process—such as cognitive processing speed, response caution, and motor execution speed—in previous research has been limited. Here, we assess the heritability of the components of the decision process, with heritability having been a common aspect of individual differences research within other areas of cognition. Importantly, a limitation of previous work on cognitive heritability is the underlying assumption that variability in response times solely reflects variability in the speed of cognitive processing. This assumption has been problematic in other domains, due to the confounding effects of caution and motor execution speed on observed response times. We extend a cognitive model of decision‐making to account for relatedness structure in a twin study paradigm. This approach can separately quantify different contributions to the heritability of response time. Using data from the Human Connectome Project, we find strong evidence for the heritability of response caution, and more ambiguous evidence for the heritability of cognitive processing speed and motor execution speed. Our study suggests that the assumption made in previous studies—that the heritability of cognitive ability is based on cognitive processing speed—may be incorrect. More generally, our methodology provides a useful avenue for future research in complex data that aims to analyze cognitive traits across different sources of related data, whether the relation is between people, tasks, experimental phases, or methods of measurement.     

Understanding memory impairment with memory models and hierarchical Bayesian analysis

The study of human episodic memory is a topic that interests cognitive and mathematical psychologists as well as clinicians interested in the diagnosis and assessment of Alzheimer’s disease and related disorders (ADRD). In this paper, we use simple cognitive models for the recognition and recall tasks typically applied in clinical assessments of ADRD to study memory performance in ADRD patients. Our models make use of hierarchical Bayesian methods as a way to model individual differences in patient performance and to facilitate the modeling of performance changes that occur during multiple recall tasks. We show how the models are able to account for different aspects of patient performance, and also discuss some of the predictive capabilities of the model. We conclude with a discussion on the scope to improve on our results by discussing the link between memory theory in psychology and clinical practice.     

Towards a relationally-orientated approach to therapy: empirical support and analysis

Drawing on contemporary evidence in the counselling and psychotherapy research field, this paper argues that there is growing support for a relationship-orientated approach to therapeutic practice. The paper reviews findings from a range of meta-analytical and individual studies which provide strong evidence for the centrality of relational factors to the successfulness of therapy, and then goes on to examine the specific variables that appear to be linked to positive therapeutic change. Having considered some of the empirical evidence that challenges this position and highlighted the importance of individual differences, the paper concludes by arguing that we need to develop and expand our understanding of the kind of relational factors and processes that most facilitate therapeutic change.     

Children show limited movement repertoire when learning a novel motor skill

Examining age differences in motor learning using real‐world tasks is often problematic due to task novelty and biomechanical confounds. Here, we investigated how children and adults acquire a novel motor skill in a virtual environment. Participants of three different age groups (9‐year‐olds, 12‐year‐olds, and adults) learned to use their upper body movements to control a cursor on a computer screen. Results showed that 9‐year‐old and 12‐year‐old children showed poorer ability to control the cursor at the end of practice. Critically, when we investigated the movement coordination, we found that the lower task performance of children was associated with limited exploration of their movement repertoire. These results reveal the critical role of motor exploration in understanding developmental differences in motor learning.     

Climate action now: How to fuel a social movement

Our research develops a framework that explores how to fuel the climate movement by accelerating grassroots, community-based climate action. Drawing on insights from consumer psychology, our framework identifies the psychological mechanisms that encourage and motivate people, both individually and collectively, to take climate action, thereby contributing to our understanding of how to advance social action and propel a social movement. Our climate action framework builds on: (1) individuals we describe as climate upstanders who rise up to take climate action with like-minded others, and (2) communities of climate upstanders who engage in collective action aimed at addressing the climate crisis. Our framework expands the field of consumer psychology by redefining the role of consumers to include the practice of social action and broadening the study of consumers to include collective, community-based action. We call on consumer psychologists to research individual and collective consumer practices related to social action and contribute to making social good central to the study of consumer psychology.     

The relevance of recent developments in classical conditioning to understanding the etiology and maintenance of anxiety disorders

Current etiological models of anxiety disorders emphasize both internal diatheses, or risk factors, and external stressors as important in the development and maintenance of clinical anxiety. Although considerable evidence suggests personality, genetic, and environmental variables are important to these diathesis-stress interactions, this general approach could be greatly enriched by incorporating recent developments in experimental research on fear and anxiety learning. In this article, we attempt to integrate the experimental literature on fear/anxiety learning and the psychopathology literature on clinical anxiety, identify areas of inconsistency, and recommend directions for future research. First, we provide an overview of contemporary models of anxiety disorders involving fear/anxiety learning. Next, we review the literature on individual differences in associative learning among anxious and non-anxious individuals. We also examine additional possible sources of individual differences in the learning of both fear and anxiety, and indicate where possible parallels may be drawn. Finally, we discuss recent developments in basic experimental research on fear conditioning and anxiety, with particular attention to research on contextual learning, and indicate the relevance of these findings to anxiety disorders.     

Chimpanzees demonstrate individual differences in social information use

Studies of transmission biases in social learning have greatly informed our understanding of how behaviour patterns may diffuse through animal populations, yet within-species inter-individual variation in social information use has received little attention and remains poorly understood. We have addressed this question by examining individual performances across multiple experiments with the same population of primates. We compiled a dataset spanning 16 social learning studies (26 experimental conditions) carried out at the same study site over a 12-year period, incorporating a total of 167 chimpanzees. We applied a binary scoring system to code each participant’s performance in each study according to whether they demonstrated evidence of using social information from conspecifics to solve the experimental task or not (Social Information Score—‘SIS’). Bayesian binomial mixed effects models were then used to estimate the extent to which individual differences influenced SIS, together with any effects of sex, rearing history, age, prior involvement in research and task type on SIS. An estimate of repeatability found that approximately half of the variance in SIS was accounted for by individual identity, indicating that individual differences play a critical role in the social learning behaviour of chimpanzees. According to the model that best fit the data, females were, depending on their rearing history, 15–24% more likely to use social information to solve experimental tasks than males. However, there was no strong evidence of an effect of age or research experience, and pedigree records indicated that SIS was not a strongly heritable trait. Our study offers a novel, transferable method for the study of individual differences in social learning.     

焦虑情绪对奖赏学习的影响

焦虑是在我们日常生活中占据重要地位的一种情绪, 对人类的决策行为能够产生显著影响。探讨决策研究的重要领域--奖赏学习, 可以帮助我们更深入地认识焦虑情绪在决策过程中扮演的角色。过往研究者较少关注焦虑对奖赏学习的潜在影响, 而且已有研究在实验技术和任务范式方面存在一定的局限性。考虑到奖赏学习概念的复杂性, 为了全面地考察个体焦虑水平与奖赏学习的关系, 本文作者建议设置不同类型的奖赏学习情境, 例如概率学习、联结学习、逆向学习和社会学习等。在上述各类不同任务中, 个体焦虑水平对奖赏学习能力的影响模式可能并不一致, 有待研究者们进行深入探讨。     

Hidden in Plain Sight: The Active Ingredients of Executive Coaching

We propose that I/O psychologists who coach executives have overlooked psychotherapy outcome research as a source of information and ideas that can be used to improve our executive coaching practices. This research, based on thousands of studies and many meta-analyses, has converged on the conclusion that four "active ingredients" account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes. We describe how this literature has identified four primary "active ingredients" that account for most of the variance in psychotherapy outcomes: 1) Client/extratherapeutic factors (40%), 2) The relationship or alliance (30%), 3) Placebo or hope (15%), and 4) Theory and technique (15%). Working on the assumption that psychotherapy and executive coaching are sufficiently similar to justify generalization from one domain to the other, we describe these four active ingredients at length and explore how they may be at work in the executive coaching process. We also suggest that I/O psychologists have training and experience that allows us to leverage some of these active ingredients in our executive coaching (e.g., understanding of client individual differences related to coaching outcomes). But we also have areas of weakness (e.g., building a strong working relationship with an individual client) that may need to be bolstered with additional training and development experiences.     

Assessing ‘good’ qualitative research in the work psychology field: A narrative analysis

This paper considers how work psychologists define ‘good’ qualitative research in the work psychology domain. In addressing the assessment of quality in work psychology research, we draw on 22 in‐depth interviews with work psychologists about their current practices and expectations around qualitative research. Using narrative analysis, the various plots and narratives that constitute how interviewees understand good qualitative research are identified. The implications of the use of these narratives for both how quality is understood and the use of qualitative research in this area are addressed. Drawing on Weick's concept of sensemaking as a theoretical framework, it is argued that the narratives identified enable the construction of a hegemonic understanding of what is good methodological practice within the work psychology discipline. The implications of this for the work psychology field and the methodological practices of work psychologists are considered.     

Dissociation of sensory facilitation and decision bias in statistical learning

ABSTRACT

The detection of regularities in the sensory environment, known as statistical learning, is an important brain function that has been observed in many experimental contexts. In these experiments, statistical learning of patterned sensory stimulation leads to improvements in the speed and/or accuracy with which subsequent stimuli are recognized. That is, statistical learning facilitates the transformation of sensory stimuli into motor responses, but the mechanism by which this occurs is unclear. Statistical learning could improve the efficiency of sensory processing, or it could bias responses toward particular outcomes. The distinction is important, as these different hypotheses imply different functions and different neural substrates for statistical learning. Here we address this problem by studying statistical learning as a decision-making process, which allows us to leverage the extensive computational literature on this topic. Specifically we describe a method for applying the Diffusion Decision Model (DDM) to isolate different sensory and cognitive processes associated with decision-making. The results indicate that statistical learning improves performance on a visual learning task in two distinct ways: by altering the efficiency of sensory processing and by introducing biases in the decision-making process. By fitting the parameters of the DDM to data from individual subjects, we find that the prominence of these two factors differed substantially across the population, and that these differences were predictive of individual performance on the psychophysical task. Overall, these results indicate that different cognitive processes can be recruited by statistical learning, and that the DDM is a powerful framework for detecting these influences.     

Inter-individual differences in sport refereeing: A review of theory and practice

Most studies on sport officials ignore the variance of the data in terms of individual differences. Here we highlight the need to focus on these differences in refereeing as the main point and goal of the current review. We argue that the study of individual differences is important for referee selection, development and performance evaluation. We present the available research on differences related to referee communication styles, types of interactions, and game management. We regard expertise and experience level as a key contributor to individual differences. Given the gap in research around the in-group variance, we discuss new directions for research and further recommendations for the field. We suggest that the areas in which more research and practice will inform our selection, training, and evaluation processes are communication and personal communication style, while having more flexibility in applying different refereeing styles to facilitate performance in different contexts.     

Neural substrates of individual differences in human fear learning: Evidence from concurrent fMRI, fear-potentiated startle, and US-expectancy data

To provide insight into individual differences in fear learning, we examined the emotional and cognitive expressions of discriminative fear conditioning in direct relation to its neural substrates. Contrary to previous behavioral-neural (fMRI) research on fear learning--in which the emotional expression of fear was generally indexed by skin conductance--we used fear-potentiated startle, a more reliable and specific index of fear. While we obtained concurrent fear-potentiated startle, neuroimaging (fMRI), and US-expectancy data, healthy participants underwent a fear-conditioning paradigm in which one of two conditioned stimuli (CS(+) but not CS(-)) was paired with a shock (unconditioned stimulus [US]). Fear learning was evident from the differential expressions of fear (CS(+) > CS(-)) at both the behavioral level (startle potentiation and US expectancy) and the neural level (in amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, hippocampus, and insula). We examined individual differences in discriminative fear conditioning by classifying participants (as conditionable vs. unconditionable) according to whether they showed successful differential startle potentiation. This revealed that the individual differences in the emotional expression of discriminative fear learning (startle potentiation) were reflected in differential amygdala activation, regardless of the cognitive expression of fear learning (CS-US contingency or hippocampal activation). Our study provides the first evidence for the potential of examining startle potentiation in concurrent fMRI research on fear learning.     

Mindfulness as a concept and a process

The use of mindfulness meditation as a therapeutic intervention has been strongly promoted in the last few years. to date there has been limited opportunity for open discussion and sharing of knowledge in relation to theory, practice or outcomes. The purpose of this paper was to provide psychologists with an understanding of the theoretical underpinning and evidence base for incorporating mindfulness practice into their lives and work. Primarily, mindfulness is presented as a cognitive style that facilitates development of a heightened sense of awareness of thought processes and emotions, and utilisation of this awareness to cultivate the ability to engage actively in being rather than reacting or doing. Further, it is noted that the learning of mindfulness meditation is believed to empower the individual to find release from depressive rumination, anxiety and stress in their lives. Current limitations, potential implications and contraindications of utilising mindfulness meditative practice are also discussed.     

Human intelligence differences: towards a combined experimental-differential approach

Despite the fact that much is known about the taxonomy and predictive validity of human intelligence differences, there has been relatively little progress in understanding their cognitive bases. However, some recent firm findings mark the beginnings of a cognitive reductionism in human intelligence. Progress towards discovering 'cognitive components' that, firstly, show individual differences and, secondly, relate to psychometric intelligence differences is described here at different nominal levels of analysis: 'psychometric', 'cognitive-experimental' and 'psychophysical'. The field of intelligence differences remains a fertile yet seriously under-developed demesne in which cognitive scientists should collaborate with differential psychologists.