Evidence of metacognitive awareness in young children who have experienced a repeated event

Two studies examined children's confidence judgments in the accuracy of their memories after repeated experience of an event. Children aged 5 to 6 years took part in an event once or four times, were provided with misinformation either shortly after (Study 1) or a while after (Study 2), and interviewed with yes/no recognition questions 3 months later. Children in the repeated‐experience conditions were highly confident of their accurate responses to questions about items that were identical rather than variable across occurrences, and this discrimination was best at the shorter delay. The results show that children were able to metacognitively monitor the accuracy of their responses to qualitatively different kinds of details, and indicate that age is not the only determinant of metacognitive awareness after being misled. Rather, the nature of event representations must also be considered. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Modulation of brain activity during phonological familiarization

We measured brain activity in 12 adults for the repetition of auditorily presented words and nonwords, before and after repeated exposure to their phonological form. The nonword phoneme combinations were either of high (HF) or low (LF) phonotactic frequency. After familiarization, we observed, for both word and nonword conditions, decreased activation in the left posterior superior temporal gyrus, in the bilateral temporal pole and middle temporal gyri. At the same time, interaction analysis showed that the magnitude of decrease of activity in bilateral posterior temporal lobe was significantly smaller for LF nonwords, relative to words and HF nonwords. Decrease of activity in this area also correlated with the size of behavioral familiarization effects for LF nonwords. The results show that the posterior superior temporal gyrus plays a fundamental role during phonological learning. Its relationship to sublexical and lexical phonological processing as well as to phonological short-term memory is discussed.     

Rhythmic masking release: effects of asynchrony, temporal overlap, harmonic relations, and source separation on cross-spectral grouping

The rhythm created by spacing a series of brief tones in a regular pattern can be disguised by interleaving identical distractors at irregular intervals. The disguised rhythm can be unmasked if the distractors are allocated to a separate stream from the rhythm by integration with temporally overlapping captors. Listeners identified which of 2 rhythms was presented, and the accuracy and rated clarity of their judgment was used to estimate the fusion of the distractors and captors. The extent of fusion depended primarily on onset asynchrony and degree of temporal overlap. Harmonic relations had some influence, but only an extreme difference in spatial location was effective (dichotic presentation). Both preattentive and attentionally driven processes governed performance.     

Combining Pharmacotherapy with cognitive-behavioral interventions for obsessive-compulsive disorder

This paper reviews the evidence-based literature concerning the efficacy and effectiveness of cognitive behavior therapy (CBT), drug treatment and their combination for obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). After a brief outline of the seminal studies, the state of the art is presented with reference to the consensual recommendations proposed in the last 10 years. Management of OCD rests on potent selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors and CBT, used separately, sequentially, or concurrently. A hierarchical model for clinical decision-making is reported. With greater severity of OCD, it is recommended to add medications. However, the response rate is still too low in many patients, and some patients remain refractory to any kind of treatment. This stresses the importance of joint efforts of psychological and biological teams to develop new treatments.     

Direct social contacts override auditory information in the song-learning process in starlings (Sturnus vulgaris)

Social influence on song acquisition was studied in 3 groups of young European starlings raised under different social conditions but with the same auditory experience of adult song. Attentional focusing on preferred partners appears the most likely explanation for differences found in song acquisition in relation to experience, sex, and song categories. Thus, pair-isolated birds learned from each other and not from broadcast live songs, females did not learn from the adult male tutors, and sharing occurred more between socially associated peers. On the contrary, single-isolated birds clearly copied the adult songs that may have been the only source of attention stimulation. Therefore, social preference appears as both a motor for song learning and a potential obstacle for acquisition from nonpreferred partners, including adults.     

A cross-linguistic data bank for oral picture naming in Dutch, English, German, French, Italian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish (PEDOI)

The well established effect of word frequency on adult's picture naming performance is now called into question. This is particularly true for variables which are correlated with frequency, as is the case of age of word acquisition. Since the work of [Carrol and White, 1973] there is growing agreement among researchers to confer an important role in lexical access to this variable. Indeed, it has been shown ( [Hodgson and Ellis, 1998]) that for normal English-speaking adults only the variables 'age-of-acquisition' and 'name agreement' are independent predictors of naming success among the various variables considered. However, when brain-damaged subjects with and without degenerative pathologies are studied, word frequency and word length as well as concept familiarity all give significant effects ( [Hirsh and Funnell, 1995]; [Lambon Ralph et al., 1998]; [Nickels and Howard, 1995]). Finally, it has been suggested that the production of specific error types may be related to such variables. According to [Nickels and Howard, 1994] the production of semantic errors is specifically affected by 'imageability' and in the recent study by [Kremin et al., 2001] 'age of acquisition' predicts (frank) word finding difficulties.     

Surface dyslexia: A case report and some theoretical implications to reading models

This paper reports on the psycholinguistic investigation of a surface dyslexic aphasic patient's abilities to handle written material. The analysis of paralexic errors produced in reading aloud single words and nonwords classically suggested that the patient was using an analytical strategy parsing the letter string stimulus, from left to right, into graphemes, and assigning phonemic values to graphemes. The patient's results were found to be sensitive to irregularities in correspondence between graphemes and phonemes not only in reading aloud but in lexical decisions, writing on dictation, rhyming, and written-word comprehension. Moreover, the patient's linguistic behavior brought out the reverse pattern observed in deep-dyslexic performances within word/nonword and content/function word dimensions. It was found that some semantic information about written words could be retrieved from both phonological and nonphonological processes presumably operating concurrently and both providing converging or conflicting pieces of meaning to the understanding of written words. Some considerations derived from the observation of this pathological reading behavior are discussed, contributing to a psycholinguistic model of normal reading.     

Lexical learning in bilingual adults: the relative importance of short-term memory for serial order and phonological knowledge

Studies of monolingual speakers have shown a strong association between lexical learning and short-term memory (STM) capacity, especially STM for serial order information. At the same time, studies of bilingual speakers suggest that phonological knowledge is the main factor that drives lexical learning. This study tested these two hypotheses simultaneously in participants with variable levels of English-French bilingual proficiency. A word-nonword paired-associate learning task was administered, with nonwords obeying French phonotactic patterns. French phonological knowledge was estimated by a composite French proficiency score summarizing productive and receptive French vocabulary knowledge as well as quantitative and qualitative measures of French exposure. STM measures maximized retention of order information (serial order reconstruction) or retention of phonological item information (single nonword delayed repetition). The French proficiency score and the serial order STM measure independently predicted performance on the paired-associate learning task. These results highlight the conjoined role of phonological knowledge and serial order STM in lexical learning. Importantly, serial order STM remains a strong predictor of lexical learning, even for bilingual individuals who have broad phonological knowledge.