Learning strategy differentially impacts memory connections in children and adults

Even once children can accurately remember their experiences, they nevertheless struggle to use those memories in flexible new ways—as in when drawing inferences. However, it remains an open question as to whether the developmental differences observed during both memory formation and inference itself represent a fundamental limitation on children's learning mechanisms, or rather their deployment of suboptimal strategy. Here, 7–9-year-old children (N = 154) and young adults (N = 130) first formed strong memories for initial (AB) associations and then engaged in one of three learning strategies as they viewed overlapping (BC) pairs. We found that being told to integrate—combine ABC during learning—both significantly improved children's ability to explicitly relate the indirectly associated A and C items during inference and protected the underlying pair memories from forgetting. However, this finding contrasted with implicit evidence for memory-to-memory connections: Adults and children both formed A-C links prior to any knowledge of an inference test—yet for children, such links were most apparent when they were told to simply encode BC, not integrate. Moreover, the accessibility of such implicit links differed between children and adults, with adults using them to make explicit inferences but children only doing so for well-established direct AB pairs. These results suggest that while a lack of integration strategy may explain a large share of the developmental differences in explicit inference, children and adults nevertheless differ in both the circumstances under which they connect interrelated memories and their ability to later leverage those links to inform flexible behaviours.

Research Highlights

• Children and adults view AB and BC pairs related through a shared item, B. This provides an opportunity for learners to connect A–C in memory.
• Being encouraged to integrate ABC during learning boosted performance on an explicit test of A–C connections (children and adults) and protected from forgetting (children).
• Children and adults differed in when implicit A–C connections were formed—occurring primarily when told to separately encode BC (children) versus integrate (adults), respectively.
• Adults used implicit A–C connections to facilitate explicit judgments, while children did not. Our results suggest developmental differences in the learning conditions promoting memory-to-memory connections.

     

Put yourself in my wheelchair: Perspective-taking can reduce prejudice toward people with disabilities and other stigmatized groups

This study aimed to compare perspective-taking with a hypothetical target and perspective-taking occurring during a real interaction with an outgroup member in reducing prejudice toward people with disabilities and other groups (e.g., immigrants, homosexual people), via increased empathy. We adopted an experimental design with two treatment groups (Hypothetical target vs. Real target) and one control group (no intervention), one pretest and two posttest measures. Participants, who were 437 students aged 11–17 years (M = 14.28; SD = 1.17), were randomly assigned to the various conditions on a classroom basis. Perspective-taking was facilitated asking participants to travel in a wheelchair on a path that simulated a real pavement in the presence (or not) of an individual with a motor disability. Findings showed that perspective-taking in the presence of a real target was more effective in reducing prejudice toward people with disabilities than perspective-taking task without encountering an outgroup member. Perspective-taking with a hypothetical target was not sufficient to increase participants' empathy toward people with disabilities, which instead was enhanced when the task was performed at the presence of a real member of that group. Positive effects produced by perspective-taking (with both a hypothetical and a real target) were transferred to immigrants and homosexuals. These findings suggest that, when possible, perspective-taking in the presence of the target, which can improve empathy by favoring a two-way exchange process, is highly recommended to improve attitudes toward different stigmatized groups, not necessarily targeted by the intervention.     

Do Neurodegenerative Diseases Affect Creativity? Divergent Thinking in Frontotemporal Dementia and Parkinson’s Disease

Creativity is considered to be one of the most important characteristics that humans possess. It emerges from fundamental cognitive operations and the activation of specific brain regions. In several neurological disorders, such as frontotemporal dementia (FTD) and Parkinson’s disease (PD), creativity plays an important role in diagnosis and rehabilitation strategies. This study examined the link between creativity and pathology in a sample of neurological patients (idiopathic PD, n = 17; FTD, n = 11 with behavioural or semantic variants), and 15 healthy subjects (Mini Mental State Examination score ≥ 20; age range, 45 to 85 years) using the Divergent Thinking Test. The FTD group exhibited lower scores than the PD and control groups. Furthermore, PD patients performed significantly better on the single DTT factor, originality, than controls.

These results are discussed in relation to neurological mechanisms that may influence creative strategies in dementia. Finally, it has been proposed creativity therapy as a cognitive rehabilitation approach, which may help patients enhance and maintain cognitive functions, reduce the severity of emotional disorders, and promote social interactions.     

Evaluation of the Effects of Prescribing Gait Complexity Using Several Fluctuating Timing Imperatives

Abstract

Variability in the temporal structure of gait patterns, measured by “Fractal Index” (FI), is thought to represent abundancy of movement patterns facilitating adaptive control of walking. However we do not know how FI changes according to different walking rhythms or if this is repeatable, as needed to exploit the paradigm for rehabilitation. Fourteen healthy young adults synchronised heel contact to an auditory metronome twice each in four conditions (uncued, white noise, pink noise, and red noise) and three sessions. FI differed based on the walking condition while no effect of session was revealed. The results of this study suggest gait fractality changes systematically with different stimuli and can be consistently prescribed in a desired direction within a group of healthy young individuals.     

Understanding indirect requests for information in high-functioning autism

Cognitive Processing - Few works have addressed the processing of indirect requests in High-Functioning Autism (HFA), and results are conflicting. Some studies report HFA individuals’...