Practice makes transfer of motor skills imperfect

We investigated the practice-effects on motor skill transfer and the associated representational memory changes that occur during the within-practice and between-practice phases. In two experiments, participants produced extension–flexion movements with their dominant right arm for a limited or prolonged practice session arranged in either a single- or multi-session format. We tested the ability of participants to transfer the original pattern (extrinsic transformation) or the mirrored one (intrinsic transformation) to the non-dominant left arm, 10?min and 24?h after the practice sessions. Results showed that practice induces rapid motor skill improvements that are non-transferable irrespective of the amount of acquisition trials. Furthermore, the extrinsic component of the skill develops early and remains the dominant coding system during practice. Conversely, we found distinct between-practice memory changes: a limited practice induces an off-line development of the extrinsic component, whereas a prolonged practice session subserves the off-line development of the intrinsic component (Experiment 2). We provided further evidence that the long-term representation of the motor skill also depends on the nature of the practice session itself: the parsing of practice into multiple sessions narrows the effector-transfer capacities in comparison to a single session (Experiment 1). These findings yield theoretical and practical implications that are discussed in the context of recent motor skill learning models.     

Tracking the construction of episodic future thoughts

The ability to mentally simulate possible futures (episodic future thinking) is of fundamental importance for various aspects of human cognition and behavior, but precisely how humans construct mental representations of future events is still essentially unknown. We suggest that episodic future thoughts consist of transitory patterns of activation over knowledge structures at different levels of specificity, with general knowledge about the personal future (i.e., personal semantic information and anticipated general events) providing a context or frame for retrieving, integrating, and interpreting episodic details. In line with this hypothesis, Study 1 showed that the construction of episodic future thoughts is frequently a protracted generative process in which general personal knowledge is accessed before episodic details. We then explored in more detail the nature of this general personal knowledge and tested the hypothesis that it is mainly organized in terms of personal goals. Study 2 showed that cuing participants with knowledge about personal goals increased the ease of future event production during a fluency task. Study 3 further demonstrated that cuing participants with their personal goals facilitated access to episodic details during the imagination of future events. Taken together, these findings indicate that general personal knowledge and, in particular, knowledge about personal goals plays an important role in the construction of episodic future thoughts.     

Tool use influences perceived shape and perceived parallelism, which serve as indirect measures of perceived distance

Targets presented just beyond arm's reach look closer when observers intend to touch them with a reach-extending tool rather than without the tool. This finding is one of several that suggest that a person's ability to act influences perceived distance to objects. However, some critics have argued that apparent action effects were actually due to effects on the judgments rather than on the perception. In other words, the target does not actually look closer, but participants report that it is. To help counter this argument, the current experiments used an indirect measure of perceived distance: Participants reported perceived shape or perceived parallelism. The results revealed that triangles looked shorter and lines looked more horizontal to participants who reached with a tool, and therefore could reach the targets, than they did to participants who reached without the tool. These results demonstrate convergence across multiple types of judgments, a finding that undermines alternative, judgment-based accounts and suggests that the ability to reach an object changes the perceived distance to the object.     

Verbal irony processing: How do contrast and humour correlate?

Verbal irony relies on contrast, that is, incongruity between the situational context and the ironic assertion. But is the degree of contrast related to the perceived humorousness of ironic comments? We answered this question by conducting two experiments. In the first experiment, participants were asked to read a list of sentence pairs (ironic or control) and judge the extent to which the meaning of the first sentence contrasted with that of the second. In the second experiment, participants were invited to rate the humorousness of ironic comments compared with their literal counterparts. Results showed that ironic remarks were rated as more contrasting and more humorous than their literal counterparts, but that humour only emerged from a moderate contrast.     

Conscious awareness of action potentiates sensorimotor learning

Many everyday skills are unconsciously learned through repetitions of the same behaviour by binding independent motor acts into unified sets of actions. However, our ability to be consciously aware of producing newly and highly trained motor skills raises the question of the role played by conscious awareness of action upon skill acquisition. In this study we strengthened conscious awareness of self-produced sequential finger movements by way of asking participants to judge their performance in terms of maximal fluency after each trial. Control conditions in which participants did not make any judgment or performance-unrelated judgments were also included. Findings indicate that conscious awareness of action, enhanced via subjective appraisal of motor efficiency, potentiates sensorimotor learning and skilful motor production in optimising the processing and sequencing of action units, as compared to the control groups. The current work lends support to the claim that the learning and skilful expression of sensorimotor behaviours might be grounded upon our ability to be consciously aware of our own motor capability and efficiency.     

Altered attention for stimuli on the hands

Attention operates in the space near the hands with unique, action-related priorities. Here, we examined how attention treats objects on the hands themselves. We tested two hypotheses. First, attention may treat stimuli on the hands like stimuli near the hands, as though the surface of the hands were the proximal case of near-hand space. Alternatively, we proposed that the surface of the hands may be attentionally distinct from the surrounding space. Specifically, we predicted that attention should be slow to orient toward the hands in order to remain entrained to near-hand space, where the targets of actions are usually located. In four experiments, we observed delayed orienting of attention on the hands compared to orienting attention near or far from the hands. Similar delayed orienting was also found for tools connected to the body compared to tools disconnected from the body. These results support our second hypothesis: attention operates differently on the functional surfaces of the hand. We suggest this effect serves a functional role in the execution of manual actions.     

Confabulating reasons for behaving bad: The psychological consequences of unconsciously activated behaviour that violates one's standards

Numerous studies have been conducted to demonstrate that behaviours are frequently activated unconsciously. The present studies investigate the downstream psychological consequences of such unconscious behaviour activation, building on work on the explanatory vacuum and post‐priming misattribution. It was hypothesized that unconsciously activated behaviours trigger a negative affective response if the behaviour violates a personal standard and that this negative affect subsequently motivates people to confabulate a reason for the behaviour. Results provided evidence for this mediated moderation model. Study 1 showed that participants who were primed to act less prosocially indeed reported increased levels of negative affect and, as a result, were inclined to confabulate a reason for their behaviour. Study 2 replicated these findings in the domain of eating and provided evidence for the moderating role of personal standards as well as the entire mediated moderation model. These findings have relevant theoretical implications as they add to the modest number of studies that demonstrate that the effect of unconscious priming may extend well beyond performing the primed behaviour itself to influence subsequent affect and attribution processes. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Executive Functions in Children and Adolescents with Turner Syndrome: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis

Turner syndrome (TS) is a genetic disorder, affecting 1/2500 to 1/3000 live female births, induced by partial or total deletion of one X chromosome. The neurocognitive profile of girls with TS is characterized by a normal Verbal IQ and weaknesses in visual-spatial, mathematics, and social cognitive domains. Executive functions (EFs) impairments have also been reported in these young patients. However, methodological differences across studies do not allow determination of which EFs are impaired and what is the magnitude of these impairments. The aim of this review was to clarify the EF profile of children and adolescents with TS. Sixteen samples, from thirteen studies, were included in the current meta-analysis. EFs measures used in these studies were classified into working memory, inhibitory control, cognitive flexibility, or higher-order EFs tasks in accordance with Diamond’s model, Annual Review of Psychology, 64, 135–168 (2013). Results confirmed that girls with TS had significant executive impairments with effect sizes varying from small (inhibitory control) to medium (cognitive flexibility) and large (working memory, higher-order EFs). Analyses by task revealed that cognitive inhibition may be more impaired than the other inhibitory control abilities. Heterogeneity across cognitive flexibility measures was also highlighted. Between-sample heterogeneity was observed for three tasks and the impact of participants’ characteristics on EFs was discussed. This meta-analysis confirms the necessity to assess, in patients living with TS, each EF by combining both visual and verbal tasks. Results also underline that, when studying girls with TS’ executive profile, it is important to explore the impact of moderator variables, such as IQ, parental socio-economic status, TS karyotype, psychiatric comorbidities, and hormonal treatment status.     

A safety mechanism for observational learning

This empirical article presents the first evidence of a “safety mechanism” based on an observational-learning paradigm. It is accepted that during observational learning, a person can use different strategies to learn a motor skill, but it is unknown whether the learner is able to circumvent the encoding of an uncompleted observed skill. In this study, participants were tested in a dyadic protocol in which an observer watched a participant practicing two different motor sequences during a learning phase. During this phase, one of the two motor sequences was interrupted by a stop signal that precluded motor learning. The results of the subsequent retention test revealed that both groups learned the two motor sequences, but only the physical practice group showed worse performance for the interrupted sequence. The observers were consequently able to use a safety strategy to learn both sequences equally. Our findings are discussed in light of the implications of the action observation network for sequence learning and the cognitive mechanisms of error-based observation.     

Mental representations of magnitude and order: A dissociation by sensorimotor learning

Numbers and spatially directed actions share cognitive representations. This assertion is derived from studies that have demonstrated that the processing of small- and large-magnitude numbers facilitates motor behaviors that are directed to the left and right, respectively. However, little is known about the role of sensorimotor learning for such number–action associations. In this study, we show that sensorimotor learning in a serial reaction-time task can modify the associations between number magnitudes and spatially directed movements. Experiments 1 and 3 revealed that this effect is present only for the learned sequence and does not transfer to a novel unpracticed sequence. Experiments 2 and 4 showed that the modification of stimulus–action associations by sensorimotor learning does not occur for other sets of ordered stimuli such as letters of the alphabet. These results strongly suggest that numbers and actions share a common magnitude representation that differs from the common order representation shared by letters and spatially directed actions. Only the magnitude representation, but not the order representation, can be modified episodically by sensorimotor learning.