Le Laboratoire de Psychologie de la Conduite de I'Organisme National de Séurité Routiēre, Montlhefy, France

Psychologie ergonomique appliquée aux situations de conduite
Psychopédagogie de la conduite et de la circulation
Psychosociologie de la communication sociale en matière de sécurité     

Qualité de vie des enfants asthmatiques : impact du sentiment d’efficacité personnelle, du ressenti des enfants, et de la gestion de l’asthme par les parents

The objective of this research was to investigate the influence of children's self-efficacy, attitudes and their parent's asthma management on quality of life among children suffering from asthma. One hundred and forty-six children (8-12 years old) with moderate to severe asthma filled in a quality of life questionnaire, and a self-efficacy and attitudes scales; 92 parents completed the childhood asthma self-management scale. Results show that the children's negative feelings about asthma and the parents’ difficulties to manage asthma are linked to a worse quality of life; the children's self-efficacy influences both positively and negatively children's quality of life. The development of parents’ asthma management program should enhance their children's quality of life.     

Développement de la mémoire de travail : relations du centre exécutif avec la boucle phonologique et le calepin visuospatial chez des enfants de CE1 et de CM2

The aim of this study was to examine the development of working memory's components and their relationships. Phonological loop's, visuospatial sketchpad's and central executive's efficiencies were assessed by simple and complex span tasks and executive tasks with verbal and visuospatial material. The analyses were performed on 64 second-grade and 55 fifth-grade children's data. Developmental performances improvement was examined according to tasks and material. Analyses of variance revealed performances improvement according to age and type of material (verbal > non verbal) for the slave system tasks and for a part of central executive's tasks. Correlation analysis and exploratory factorial analysis suggested that slave systems would become progressively more specific and that central executive's efficiency would be dependent on this specialization.     

Effets de l’âge et de la capacité de mémoire de travail sur l’exécution d’instructions de complexité variable chez des adultes jeunes et âgés

Technical devices are part of elderly people's daily life. Meanwhile, research has not yet systematically explored how old people understand procedural instructions accompanying these devices. Thus, the aim of this study was to investigate how age and memory span affect how people follow procedural instructions. To do so, the Reading Span Test of Daneman & Carpenter (1980) and an adaptation of the Kaplan & White's (1980) following directions game were administrated to young and older adults. The Reading Span Test was administrated in order to determine the participants’ memory span size. Then, participants had to follow procedural instructions with a growing complexity displayed on a computer screen. Results show that participants’ age and instructions complexity affect how the instructions are performed. Old adults encounter more difficulty performing the task than young adults. Furthermore, whatever the age, as the complexity of instructions increases, low-span participants have more difficulty performing instructions than high-span participants do.     

Généralisation de propriétés biologiques, physiques et comportementales chez l’enfant de cinq à neuf ans

This study is designed to examine how biological knowledge is organized and structured in children. Five- to nine-year-old children's interpretations of biological phenomena are studied by examining to what extent the transmission of different kinds of properties is perceived as being causally related to birth origins. A property generalization task is used, in which biological relations (birth origins) are pitted against adoptive relations. The characteristics to be generalized correspond to non-obvious biological characteristics, visible physic characteristics or behavioural characteristics. Our results show that five-year-old children do not understand the origin of these characteristics. A conceptual change seems to be at work by the age of seven but the delimitation of biological categories remains imperfect.     

Le rôle de la mémoire de travail dans la production écrite de textes

Integration of capacity (Just and Carpenter, 1992) and componentiel (Baddeley, 1986) conceptions of working memory in models of text composition (Hayes, 1996 ; Kellogg, 1996 ; McCutchen, 1996) has allowed studying several facets of the role of working memory in writing acquisition and in expert management of the writing processes. This article presents these two conceptions and examines their respective contribution in the field of writing research from two perspectives: The demands of the writing processes (in terms of processing and transient storage) and the influence of working memory capacity on the control of production. The conclusion underlines the importance of investigating the on-line management of text production, the role of the visuo-spatial sketchpad, and to link strategies for allocating the working memory resources with text quality.