Is running a state of mind? Sports training as a potential method for developing cognitive flexibility

The study aimed to test the significance of sports participation as a potential means of improving cognitive function, particularly cognitive flexibility. Based on the characteristics of orienteering, such as frequent changes of behavioural strategies in response to changes in the situation or the simultaneous performance of several mental activities, we assumed that practising this sport could foster the development of cognitive flexibility. Two groups of volunteers were compared: 50 middle and long-distance runners and 50 orienteering runners in terms of their performance on the following measures of cognitive flexibility: a divergent thinking task, a computer flexibility task, Cognitive Flexibility Scale, and Verbal Fluency Test as a measure of executive function. Orienteering runners outperformed others on all measures except the Cognitive Flexibility Scale. Furthermore, we found that training characteristics (regularity, frequency, participation in competitions) were associated with levels of cognitive flexibility, particularly among orienteering runners, where they explained between 38% and 39% of the overall flexibility variance. Our results suggest that cognitive flexibility can be developed through sports training requiring effective dealing in a changing, complex environment. We also discuss the implications of our results for cognitive training research.     

The dual pathway to creativity model: Creative ideation as a function of flexibility and persistence

The dual pathway to creativity model argues that creativity—the generation of original and appropriate ideas—is a function of cognitive flexibility and cognitive persistence, and that dispositional or situational variables may influence creativity either through their effects on flexibility, on persistence, or both. This model is tested in a number of studies in which participants performed creative ideation tasks. We review work showing that cognitive flexibility, operationalised as the number of content categories surveyed, directly relates to idea originality, but that originality can also be achieved by exploring a few content categories in great depth (i.e., persistence). We also show that a global processing mode is associated with cognitive flexibility, but only leads to high originality in tasks that capitalise on cognitive flexibility. We finally show that activating positive mood states enhance creativity because they stimulate flexibility, while activating negative mood states can enhance creativity because they stimulate persistence. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.     

Toward integrating cognitive components with computational models of emotion using software design patterns

Computational models of emotion (CMEs) are software systems designed to imitate particular aspects of human emotions. The main purpose of this type of computational model is to capture the complexity of the human emotion process in a software system that is incorporated into a cognitive agent architecture. However, creating a CME that closely imitates the actual functioning of emotions demands to address some challenges such as (i) sharing information among independently developed cognitive and affective components, and (ii) interconnecting complex cognitive and affective components that must interact with one another in order to generate realistic emotions, which may even affect agents’ decision making. This paper proposes an architectural pattern aimed at cataloging and describing fundamental components of CMEs and their interrelationships with cognitive components. In this architectural pattern, external cognitive components and internal affective components of CMEs do not interact directly but are extended by including message exchange methods in order to use a publish-subscribe channel, which enables their intercommunication, thus attenuating issues such as software heterogeneity. This structural approach centralizes communication management and separates the inherent complexity of the cognitive and affective processes from the complexity of their interaction mechanisms. In so doing, it enables the design of CMEs’ architectures composed of independently developed affective and cognitive components. The proposed architectural pattern attempts to make progress in capturing the complex process of human emotions in a software system that adheres to software engineering best practices and that incorporates quality attributes such as flexibility and interoperability.     

Criteria for the design and evaluation of cognitive architectures

Cognitive architectures are unified theories of cognition that take the form of computational formalisms. They support computational models that collectively account for large numbers of empirical regularities using small numbers of computational mechanisms. Empirical coverage and parsimony are the most prominent criteria by which architectures are designed and evaluated, but they are not the only ones. This paper considers three additional criteria that have been comparatively undertheorized. (a) Successful architectures possess subjective and intersubjective meaning, making cognition comprehensible to individual cognitive scientists and organizing groups of like-minded cognitive scientists into genuine communities. (b) Successful architectures provide idioms that structure the design and interpretation of computational models. (c) Successful architectures are strange: They make provocative, often disturbing, and ultimately compelling claims about human information processing that demand evaluation.     

Neuropsychological Sequelae of Non-Central Nervous System Cancer and Cancer Therapy

Cancer patients report numerous adverse symptoms associated with their disease and treatment including cognitive dysfunction, fatigue, and affective distress. Cognitive dysfunction is ubiquitous in patients with primary central nervous system (CNS) cancer and recent evidence has documented similar deficits in patients with non-CNS cancer as well. Both the cancer itself and treatments including chemotherapy, biological response modifiers, and hormonal therapies have been demonstrated to adversely impact cognitive and neurobehavioral function. Neuroimaging and neurophysiological investigations have likewise revealed alterations in brain function that are helping to account for the nature of these cognitive disorders. Similarly, preclinical animal research is assisting to identify the pathophysiological mechanisms that underlie treatment-related neurotoxicities. The coalescence of multidisciplinary clinical and research efforts hold promise for the development of interventions that may offer neuroprotection in addition to currently available symptomatic therapies and cognitive rehabilitation techniques.     

情绪加工老龄化机制：表情的自动加工和控制加工视角

情绪加工老龄化已经成为老龄化研究的新热点, 但其内在机制仍然缺乏统一的解释。本研究以自动加工和控制加工为切入点, 综合行为实验、ERP和fMRI实验技术, 开展表情加工的老龄化研究, 从情绪与认知交互的角度进一步揭示情绪加工老龄化的内在机制。具体内容包括表情自动加工和控制加工的年龄差异及其神经机制, 表情自动加工与认知控制的相互作用, 以及个体差异在情绪加工老龄化中的作用等。本研究将加深对情绪加工老龄化的理解, 为相关理论模型的验证、修正和完善提供实证依据。     

Key characteristics of decision making in soccer and their implications

This paper puts forward the position that the cognitivist approach adopted in research on decision making in team sports leads to a disconnection from the actual environment of play. The argument is structured as a narrative review of 60 articles that were analyzed to identify the most recent concepts related to the following topics or combinations thereof: tactics and action in the play; decision making and associated cognitive mechanisms and skills; and the teaching–learning–training process. The results of the review led us to characterize decision making in the team sports context as being (a) “prereflected,” (b) based on evaluation, (c) frugal, and (d) “generated,” as opposed to being a process of choosing from alternatives. In addition to showing clear adjustments to the environment of play, the four characteristics imply that teaching, learning, and training to play should also be designed according to the restrictions imposed by the context and the actual lived experience of the play. We conclude that cognition should not be considered solely responsible for decisions, and thus both theoretical and pedagogical models of player development should take the ecological perspective of decision making into account. As a result, the methodologies employed to develop players from an early age could be elaborated on by taking into account the interaction between cognitive skills and the possibilities emerging in the play.     

Trial-by-trial adjustments in control triggered by incidentally encoded semantic cues

Cognitive control mechanisms provide the flexibility to rapidly adapt to contextual demands. These contexts can be defined by top-down goals—but also by bottom-up perceptual factors, such as the location at which a visual stimulus appears. There are now several experiments reporting contextual control effects. Such experiments establish that contexts defined by low-level perceptual cues such as the location of a visual stimulus can lead to context-specific control, suggesting a relatively early focus for cognitive control. The current set of experiments involved a word–word interference task designed to assess whether a high-level cue, the semantic category to which a word belongs, can also facilitate contextual control. Indeed, participants exhibit a larger Flanker effect to items pertaining to a semantic category in which 75% of stimuli are incongruent than in response to items pertaining to a category in which 25% of stimuli are incongruent. Thus, both low-level and high-level stimulus features can affect the bottom-up engagement of cognitive control. The implications for current models of cognitive control are discussed.     

Happiness Revisited: Ontological Well-Being as a Theory-Based Construct of Subjective Well-Being

The current model of subjective well-being (SWB) has been operationalized as the unity of affective and cognitive dimensions concerning the evaluation of one’s life, called emotional well-being and life satisfaction, respectively. There has been no theoretical framework, however, by which the unity is explained. The present paper offers a new construct of subjective well-being in an attempt to show that the cognitive and affective dimensions of SWB can be unified using the concept of goal. The concept of goal refers to the life as a project when the concern is the evaluation of life as a whole. The evaluation of the whole life, moreover, should take a whole-time perspective into account if it is supposed to be ‘whole’. Ontological well-being (OWB) construct is structured in a theoretical framework by which the cognitive and affective components of the current conceptualization of SWB are reframed and interpreted in a whole time perspective. By taking as base the historical and philosophical resources of the affective and cognitive dimensions of subjective well-being, this new construct defines subjective well-being as one’s evaluation of life in both past and future time perspectives in addition to the present.     

Liens entre le déclin sensoriel et cognitif dans le vieillissement normal : revue critique de la littérature et apports de l’approche incarnée et située de la cognition

Biological aging impacts many organs including sensory's ones and the brain, and thus, cognition. Research has shown that the sensory and cognitive decline are positively correlated. The main data from this literature are firstly reviewed in the present article. Then, the four main hypotheses that are generally proposed to explain these associations are presented. According to them, sensory decline is supposed to cause cognitive decline, or vice-versa, or these concomitant changes result from the general alteration of the nervous system. However, none of them seems able to account for all of the existing data. Moreover, the precise mechanisms that may drive these associations remain to be clarified. The rest of the article is then dedicated to the embodied and situated cognition approach as it provides a particularly interesting and adequate framework to account for these links. Indeed, according to this approach, cognitive representations are grounded in their sensorimotor properties. In other words, cognitive functioning is not conceived as detached from sensory functioning, but instead directly dependent of it. Representations are thus thought to emerge from the sensorimotor simulation of the properties involved in these representations. Therefore, sensory decline should directly impact cognitive performance. It is then hypothesized that older adults have low-resolution representations decreasing the signal on noise ratio of traces, increasing sensorimotor interferences and thus decreasing cognitive performance. This approach leads to consider low and high levels of sensory and perceptual functioning, which are both impaired in aging. Therefore, the repercussion of the sensory-perceptual decline is not only valid for present processing, but also extend to all past knowledge. Several predictions are then proposed on (1) the link between high-level perceptual functioning and cognitive functioning in older adults; (2) the possible interaction in young adults between sensory and high-level perceptual functioning as a function of the level of interference of the material involved; (3) the possible link between the motor and cognitive functioning in older adults. The clinical consequences in terms of cognitive stimulation of such a perspective will close the article. It is proposed to develop a stimulation program based on pattern separation mechanism to better process sensory interference in order to train older adults to improve cognitive precision and thus performance.     

Further Evidence That Sleep Deprivation Effects and the Vigilance Decrement Are Functionally Equivalent: Comment on Altmann (2018)

Veksler and Gunzelmann (2018) argue that the vigilance decrement and the deleterious effects of sleep loss reflect functionally equivalent degradations in cognitive processing and performance. Our account is implemented in a cognitive architecture, where these factors produce breakdowns in goal‐directed cognitive processing that we refer to as microlapses. Altmann (2018) raises a number of challenges to microlapses as a unified account of these deficits. Under scrutiny, however, the challenges do little to discredit the theory or conclusions in the original paper. In our response, we address the most serious challenges. In so doing, we provide additional support for the theory and mechanisms, and we highlight opportunities for extending their explanatory breadth.     

Concepts as Pluralistic Hybrids

In contrast to earlier views that argued for a particular kind of concept (e.g. prototypes), several recent accounts have proposed that there are multiple distinct kinds of concepts, or that there is a plurality of concepts for each category. In this paper, I argue for a novel account of concepts as pluralistic hybrids. According to this view, concepts are pluralistic because there are several concepts for the same category whose use is heavily determined by context. In addition, concepts are hybrids because they typically link together several different kinds of information that are used in the same cognitive processes. This alternative view accounts for the available empirical data, allows for greater cognitive flexibility than Machery's recent account, and overcomes several objections to traditional hybrid views.     

Rapid instructed task learning: A new window into the human brain’s unique capacity for flexible cognitive control

The human ability to flexibly adapt to novel circumstances is extraordinary. Perhaps the most illustrative, yet underappreciated, form of this cognitive flexibility is rapid instructed task learning (RITL)—the ability to rapidly reconfigure our minds to perform new tasks from instructions. This ability is important for everyday life (e.g., learning to use new technologies) and is used to instruct participants in nearly every study of human cognition. We review the development of RITL as a circumscribed domain of cognitive neuroscience investigation, culminating in recent demonstrations that RITL is implemented via brain circuits centered on lateral prefrontal cortex. We then build on this and the recent discovery of compositional representations within lateral prefrontal cortex to develop an integrative theory of cognitive flexibility and cognitive control that identifies mechanisms that may enable RITL within the human brain. The insights gained from this new theoretical account have important implications for further developments and applications of RITL research.     

Background Television as an Inhibitor of Cognitive Processing

Proposed and tested is a causal process that could account for empirical relationships between television viewing and academic achievement. It is argued that television, when used as a secondary activity, interferes with performance on otherwise intellectually demanding tasks. Performance on seven different cognitive processing tests were examined for respondents in four television-viewing conditions and a no-TV control group. Dependent variables included measures of short-term memory, linguistic processing speed, reading comprehension, complex problem-solving abilities, and mental flexibility. Predictions based on four mechanisms were tested. Significant performance decrements in television conditions occurred for measures of reading comprehension, spatial problem solving, and cognitive flexibility. Results were most consistent with the idea that background television influences performance by causing cognitive processing capacity limits to be exceeded on difficult and complex tasks.     

Stimulation cognitive chez les personnes âgées : effets d’une méthode de stimulation cognitive par les jeux sur les fonctions cognitives et l’estime de soi

The purpose of this study was to examine the effects of a cognitive stimulation program with games on scores to cognitive tests (processing speed, mental flexibility, working memory, inhibition) and how this program can benefit to a psycho-affective measure, self-esteem in older adults. Forty-eight participants over 60 years old took part in the experiment. They were divided into two groups: 1 group followed a program of cognitive stimulation using leisure activities with games and 1 control group in which people gathered every week. There were 8 sessions of cognitive stimulation using leisure activities like games, one-hour session a week. Measures have focused on speed of processing and executive functions (shifting, updating and inhibition). They have been evaluated before and after the training program. Results show that the cognitive stimulation program using leisure activities with games is effective on speed of processing, memory span, inhibition and self-esteem but shows no benefits on shifting and updating. These results indicate that it seems to be possible to enhance cognitive resources, inhibition and self-esteem using leisure activities with games as a tool for cognitive stimulation.     

Effects of cognitive load presence and duration on driver eye movements and event detection performance

This study examined the effects of cognitive load on driving performance for interactions with an in-vehicle information system (IVIS) that varied in duration from 1 to 4 min. Twelve participants drove in a simulator while intermittently performing the IVIS task. There were three IVIS conditions: interacting with the IVIS, non-IVIS periods between IVIS interactions, and baseline driving without the IVIS task. Contrary to our hypothesis, driver response to lead vehicle braking was surprisingly uniform across IVIS conditions. IVIS interaction did undermine driver ability to detect the bicyclist along the side of the road, and some of these performance decrements persisted after the IVIS interaction had ended. Reaction time for bicyclist detection increased from the first to the subsequent minutes of the interaction. Eye movements were influenced by the IVIS conditions but not by task duration. Both ANOVA and factor analyses revealed that some of the changes in eye movements were concurrent with IVIS interaction while others persisted after the driver completed the IVIS interaction. Overall, the findings suggest that two mechanisms might account for the distraction-related performance decrements in this study: competition for processing resources and interference due to activation of competing goals.     

A critical evaluation of cognitive inhibition in dissociative identity disorder as inferred by negative priming in the flanker task: Limitations and the episodic retrieval alternative

Studies examining negative priming in dissociative identity disorder (DID) using the flanker task have reported emotional context effects. Significant negative priming is evident when individuals with DID are assessed in a context deemed emotionally neutral, while in contexts designed to elevate anxiety, DID samples display reduced negative priming. Limitations and considerations are discussed around statistical power, generalizability and reliability, and the use of diagnostic groups over specific clinical symptoms. The negative priming findings in this growing body of work have been interpreted with reference to the functioning of cognitive inhibitory mechanisms. Explored is how the episodic retrieval account of negative priming, with its reliance on memory mechanisms, could account for the DID findings. Encoding and retrieval possibilities are discussed and it is concluded that a failure to encode the prime trial distractor stimulus, in contexts of heightened anxiety, could explain the experimental findings from an episodic retrieval perspective.     

The Cognitive Architecture of Perceived Animacy: Intention,Attention, and Memory

Human vision supports social perception by efficiently detecting agents and extracting rich information about their actions, goals, and intentions. Here, we explore the cognitive architecture of perceived animacy by constructing Bayesian models that integrate domain‐specific hypotheses of social agency with domain‐general cognitive constraints on sensory, memory, and attentional processing. Our model posits that perceived animacy combines a bottom–up, feature‐based, parallel search for goal‐directed movements with a top–down selection process for intent inference. The interaction of these architecturally distinct processes makes perceived animacy fast, flexible, and yet cognitively efficient. In the context of chasing, in which a predator (the “wolf”) pursues a prey (the “sheep”), our model addresses the computational challenge of identifying target agents among varying numbers of distractor objects, despite a quadratic increase in the number of possible interactions as more objects appear in a scene. By comparing modeling results with human psychophysics in several studies, we show that the effectiveness and efficiency of human perceived animacy can be explained by a Bayesian ideal observer model with realistic cognitive constraints. These results provide an understanding of perceived animacy at the algorithmic level—how it is achieved by cognitive mechanisms such as attention and working memory, and how it can be integrated with higher‐level reasoning about social agency.     

Youth Cognitive Empowerment: Development and Evaluation of an Instrument

Psychological empowerment (PE) is a multicomponent construct that involves the mechanisms through which people and groups gain control over their lives and environments. Psychological empowerment has previously been operationalized using measures of sociopolitical control among young people, with findings indicating links between PE and other positive developmental outcomes. Sociopolitical control, however, is only an indicator for the emotional component of PE. Research has largely neglected the cognitive component of PE, particularly in studies of younger people. In fact, few studies to date have presented and empirically tested measurement instruments for the cognitive component of PE among youth. In this study, we adapted a measure, which previously had been validated and used among adults, for use among young people and tested it in a sample of high school students (53% female, 75% Hispanic) in an urban school in the northeastern U.S. Confirmatory factor analyses were used to assess the hypothesized three‐factor structure of cognitive empowerment, and the measure was examined for association with the construct of social justice orientation. Results indicate an adequate fit for the second‐order factor, and an expected relationship with the related construct.     

人际自立特质对大学生情绪调节策略作用的纵向研究

虽然不少学者认为人格会影响情绪调节策略的使用,但是目前尚缺乏人格与认知重评、表达抑制这两种情绪调节策略关系的纵向研究。根据人际自立与情绪关系的系列研究,假设人际自立会影响情绪调节策略的使用。采用青少年学生人际自立量表和情绪调节问卷对374名大学生进行了间隔6个月的两次调查。结果发现,人际主动、人际灵活显著预测6个月后的认知重评。这说明某些人格特质可以影响特定情绪调节策略的使用。