The Functional Role of Cognitive Frameworks on Visuomotor Adaptation Performance

The authors investigated the effects of cognitive representations of movement directions on sensorimotor adaptation performance. Adaptation performance was measured via a pointing experiment in which participants were provided with visual feedback that was distorted along the midsagittal plane (i.e., left-right reversal). Performance was analyzed relative to participants’ individual adaptation gains and 3 groups were subsequently defined (i.e., skilled, average, and poor adapters). The group separation was kept for the Cognitive Measurement of Represented Directions, which was used to analyze participants’ cognitive representation of movement directions. The results showed that skilled adapters, in contrast to poor adapters, possess a global representation of movement directions aligned to the cardinal axes. The cognitive representation structure hence supports the sensorimotor adaptation performance.     

The development of prospective memory in young schoolchildren: The impact of ongoing task absorption,cue salience,and cue centrality

This study presents evidence that 9- and 10-year-old children outperform 6- and 7-year-old children on a measure of event-based prospective memory and that retrieval-based factors systematically influence performance and age differences. All experiments revealed significant age effects in prospective memory even after controlling for ongoing task performance. In addition, the provision of a less absorbing ongoing task (Experiment 1), higher cue salience (Experiment 2), and cues appearing in the center of attention (Experiment 3) were each associated with better performance. Of particular developmental importance was an age by cue centrality (in or outside of the center of attention) interaction that emerged in Experiment 3. Thus, age effects were restricted to prospective memory cues appearing outside of the center of attention, suggesting that the development of prospective memory across early school years may be modulated by whether a cue requires overt monitoring beyond the immediate attentional context. Because whether a cue is in or outside of the center of attention might determine the amount of executive control needed in a prospective memory task, findings suggest that developing executive control resources may drive prospective memory development across primary school age.     

Complexity,information and time

Evolution proceeds in time. Time is experienced as change only, predominantly irreversible change. Measuring change in the form of information growth it is possible to define a measure for the amount of time produced during information increase. Systems creating information contribute to the generation of time. To be able to create information, a system has to be highly complex. The more complex a system is, the more it can contribute to generation of time. The rate of time generation is determined by the capability of the system to gain information. Complexity, information accumulation, and time generation are therefore synonyms.     

Event-based prospective memory in depression: The impact of cue focality

This study is the first to compare event-based prospective memory performance in individuals with depression and healthy controls. The degree to which self-initiated processing is required to perform the prospective memory task was varied. Twenty-eight individuals with depression and 32 healthy controls worked on a computerised prospective memory task. Prospective cues were either presented focally or non-focally to the ongoing activity. Collapsing data across both conditions, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the prospective memory task. Overall, participants showed a poorer prospective memory performance in the non-focal condition that required self-initiated processing to a higher degree than the focal condition. Importantly, as revealed by a group by task condition interaction, groups did not differ in the focal condition, whereas, controls outperformed individuals with depression in the non-focal condition. The results are in line with the multiprocess framework of event-based prospective remembering and the cognitive-initiative account of depression-related cognitive deficits.     

Flexibility is not always adaptive: Affective flexibility and inflexibility predict rumination use in everyday life

The present study examined whether cognitive flexibility in the processing of emotional material (i.e., affective flexibility) predicts the use of rumination in response to negative events in daily life. One hundred fifty-seven undergraduate participants completed daily diaries for six consecutive days. Affective flexibility was measured with a novel task-switching paradigm using emotional pictures. Results show that affective inflexibility when switching away from processing the emotional meaning of negative material was associated with increased use of rumination in daily life. In contrast, affective inflexibility when switching away from processing the emotional meaning of positive material was related to decreased use of rumination. Importantly, affective flexibility predicted use of rumination beyond non-affective measures of executive functioning. This is the first study to show that inflexibility is not uniformly associated with increased rumination but that inflexibility in the processing of positive material can predict lower levels of rumination.     

An adaptive-learning approach to affect regulation: Strategic influences on evaluative priming

An adaptive cognition approach to evaluative priming is not compatible with the view that the entire process is automatically determined by prime stimulus valence alone. In addition to the evaluative congruity of individual prime–target pairs, an adaptive regulation function should be sensitive to the base rates of positive and negative stimuli as well as to the perceived contingency between prime and target valence. The present study was particularly concerned with pseudocontingent inferences that offer a proxy for the assessment of contingencies from degraded or incomplete stimulus input. As expected, response latencies were shorter for the more prevalent target valence and for evaluatively congruent trials. However, crucially, the congruity effect was eliminated and overridden by pseudocontingencies inferred from the stimulus environment. These strategic inferences were further enhanced when the task called for the evaluation of both prime stimuli and target stimuli.     

Complex Prospective Memory in Children with ADHD

The ability to remember intentions (prospective memory) is fundamental to the organization of goal-directed actions in everyday life. Successful prospective remembering involves forming, retaining, initiating, and executing an intention. Although previous research has demonstrated prospective memory impairments in children with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), this has largely focused on the intention initiation and execution stages. In this study, we investigate the performance of 20 children with ADHD and 20 matched controls at each of the four stages of prospective memory, using a computer multitask paradigm. Results suggest that children with ADHD may demonstrate difficulties forming delayed intentions, as indicated by impulsive planning, and that this may have further implications for the retention and implementation of these delayed intentions. While children with ADHD showed comparable multitask switching, this appeared to be at the expense of intention execution as they made more performance errors than controls. Implications for day-to-day functioning are discussed.