Adult brains don't fully overcome biases that lead to incorrect performance during cognitive development: an fMRI study in young adults completing a Piaget‐like task

A current issue in developmental science is that greater continuity in cognition between children and adults may exist than is usually appreciated in Piaget‐like (stages or ‘staircase’) models. This phenomenon has been demonstrated at the behavioural level, but never at the brain level. Here we show with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), for the first time, that adult brains do not fully overcome the biases of childhood. More specifically, the aim of this fMRI study was to evaluate whether the perceptual bias that leads to incorrect performance during cognitive development in a Piaget‐like task is still a bias in the adult brain and hence requires an executive network to overcome it. Here, we compared two numerical‐judgment tasks, one being a Piaget‐like task with number–length interference (called ‘INT’) and the other being a control task with number–length covariation (‘COV’). We also used a colour‐detection task to control for stimuli numerosity, spatial distribution, and frequency. Our behavioural results confirmed that INT remains a difficult task for young adults. Indeed, response times were significantly higher in INT than in COV. Moreover, we observed that only in INT did response times increase linearly as a function of the number of items. The fMRI results indicate that the brain network common to INT and COV shows a large rightward functional asymmetry, emphasizing the visuospatial nature of these two tasks. When INT was compared with COV, activations were found within a right frontal network, including the pre‐supplementary motor area, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the middle frontal gyrus, which probably reflect detection of the number/length conflict and inhibition of the ‘length‐equals‐number’ response strategy. Finally, activations related to visuospatial and quantitative processing, enhanced or specifically recruited in the Piaget‐like task, were found in bilateral posterior areas.     

Kinematic adaptation to sudden changes in visual task constraints during reciprocal aiming

In a series of three experiments the visual modulation of movement during a reciprocal aiming task was examined when participants were confronted with sudden changes in visually specified task constraints. Amplitude and precision constraints were manipulated independently in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively, while their simultaneous effects were analyzed in Experiment 3. Analysis of the evolution of kinematic characteristics following a sudden change in task constraints revealed two different times scales of adaptation: a rapid adjustment occurring during the deceleration phase of the first movement following change and a more gradual adaptation, affecting the kinematic pattern as a whole, occurring over the next few movements. Overall, the results indicate that visual information with respect to the adequacy of the unfolding movement is continuously monitored, even under the least constraining conditions, and serves to modulate the pattern of movement to (a) comply with the (new) task constraints and (b) optimally tailor the pattern of movement to the situation at hand. We interpret these findings in the framework of a dynamical perspective on movement organization, with information modulating the parameters of an otherwise invariant underlying dynamical structure.     

Gender attribution and gender agreement in 4- to 10-year-old French children

Grammatical gender is generally considered an early and error-free acquisition in French children. This article first examines how children cope with the gender attribution problem, i.e., how they determine the gender of individual nouns. We consider the plausibility and requirements of an account in which tacit phonological assignment rules are put to use to solve attribution problems and contrast it with a simple “masculine as default” strategy. Elicited production data from three experiments, involving 312 4–10-year-old French children and 40 adult controls, were found compatible with this latter scenario and to provide only scant support for the former one. Second, we argue that previous studies have overestimated French children's gender agreement abilities, and that French children's ability to make the article and the adjective agree can be assumed from age 7 onwards, but not before.