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.     

Attentional bias for doping words and its relation with physical self-esteem in young adolescents

ObjectivesPrevious studies revealed that adolescence is a period of risk for doping and drug addiction and that young athletes who used doping agents reported low self-esteem. We conducted a preventive study with the aims to investigate whether young adolescents displayed an attentional bias to doping-related words and whether this attentional bias was related to physical self-esteem.MethodNinety seven adolescents (44 girls and 53 boys) from 11 to 15 years-old participated to a study designed to measure reaction times (RT) in a Stroop emotional task related to doping, cheating and control words. They also completed the Physical Self-Perception Profile subscales assessing perceived general self-esteem, physical self-worth, physical condition, sport competence, body attractiveness, and physical strength.ResultsParticipants exhibited longer RT after doping words than after control words. RT was also longer after doping than after cheating words. Participants belonging to the low physical self-esteem group exhibited larger carry-over effects than those who were in the high physical self-esteem group.ConclusionsThese findings suggest that attentional resources allocated to doping words are already present at the onset of adolescence, and that they may be linked to a psychological feature (physical self-esteem) considered as a risk factor of substance abuse in young adults involved in competitive sports.     

Unfamiliar face recognition in children with autistic spectrum disorders

We investigated unfamiliar face recognition in low‐functioning children with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD) using a ‘part‐of‐face’ method. This method has not previously been used for unfamiliar faces with this population. The ‘part‐of‐face’ procedure provides measures of both face recognition accuracy and of processing style. We compared the performance of the children with ASD with three control groups: children with developmental delay (DD), typically developing (TD) children matched for verbal cognitive ability and TD children matched for chronological age (CA). Compared to the DD group, the ASD group showed similar processing in recognition accuracy and processing style. Compared to the TD children, the ASD group did not show the same level of accuracy as controls of the same CA, instead showing similar performance to younger TD children. However, as both children with ASD and DD showed the same performance, no ASD‐specific deficit was found. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Math in actions: Actor mode reveals the true arithmetic abilities of French-speaking 2-year-olds in a magic task

Our previous studies provide some evidence of between-language effects on arithmetic performance in 2-year-olds. French-speaking children were especially biased by the use of the word un as a cardinal value and as an article in the singular/plural opposition (1 vs. the set 2, 3, …). Here we evaluated the ability of a new action-based assessment method to avoid this bias. A total of 80 French-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds were confronted with impossible (1 + 1 = 1 or 1 + 1 = 3) and possible (1 + 1 = 2) addition problems that triggered the bias. The problems were either presented to the children by the experimenter (onlooker mode) or realized by themselves (actor mode). The 2-year-olds performed better in the actor mode than in the onlooker mode. A subtraction control with no language ambiguity (2-1 = 2 or 1) was conducted with 80 other children; both modes elicited comparable performances regardless of age. These data indicate that the actor mode is effective for assessing arithmetic ability in French-speaking 2-year-olds.     

Temporal representation impairment in developmental dyslexia for unisensory and multisensory stimuli

Dyslexia has been associated with a problem in visual–audio integration mechanisms. Here, we investigate for the first time the contribution of unisensory cues on multisensory audio and visual integration in 32 dyslexic children by modelling results using the Bayesian approach. Non‐linguistic stimuli were used. Children performed a temporal task: they had to report whether the middle of three stimuli was closer in time to the first one or to the last one presented. Children with dyslexia, compared with typical children, exhibited poorer unimodal thresholds, requiring greater temporal distance between items for correct judgements, while multisensory thresholds were well predicted by the Bayesian model. This result suggests that the multisensory deficit in dyslexia is due to impaired audio and visual inputs rather than impaired multisensory processing per se. We also observed that poorer temporal skills correlated with lower reading skills in dyslexic children, suggesting that this temporal capability can be linked to reading abilities.     

The Spatiality of Pain

Abstract

My remarks on Metz’s project will focus on another angle than the one Metz uses. I am more interested in thinking about whether and how far ethical standards from different cultures really differ, how to understand those differences, and how to relate them to what is objectively good, independently of people’s opinions on the matter. Of course one widely circulating opinion on the topic is that cross-cultural differences somehow demonstrate that there is no such thing as objective good at all - that each culture has its own conception of what is good, right, permitted, forbidden, and so on, and the differences are so wide that anyone at all familiar with this, can no longer take seriously the idea that there could be any “objective” values underlying such varied systems.     

From Context to Code: Information Transfer Constrains the Emergence of Graphic Codes

Humans commit information to graphic symbols for three basic reasons: as a memory aid, as a tool for thinking, and as a means of communication. Yet, despite the benefits of transmitting information graphically, we still know very little about the biases and constraints acting on the emergence of stable, powerful, and accurate graphic codes (such as writing). Using a reference game, where participants play as Messengers and Recipients, we experimentally manipulate the function of the task (communicative or non‐communicative) and investigate whether this shapes the emergence of stable, powerful, and accurate codes for both synchronous and asynchronous modes of information transfer. Only in the Dialogue condition, where Messenger and Recipient are two different persons communicating within the same time frame (i.e., synchronously), do we consistently observe the emergence of stable, powerful, and accurate graphic codes. Such codes are unnecessary for participants in Recall, where Messenger and Recipient are the same person transferring information within the same time frame, and they fail to emerge in Correspondence, where Messenger and Recipient are two different persons communicating across time frames (i.e., asynchronously). Lastly, in the Mnemonic condition, where Messenger and Recipient are the same person at different points in time, participants achieve high accuracy but with codes that are suboptimal in terms of power and stability. Our results suggest that the rarity and late arrival of stable, powerful, and accurate graphic codes in human history largely stems from strong constraints on information transfer. In particular, we suggest that these constraints limit a code's ability to reach an adequate tradeoff between information that needs to be explicitly encoded and information that needs to be inferred from context.     

Addressing anniversary reactions of trauma through group process: the Hurricane Katrina anniversary wellness workshops

Natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina, which devastated the Gulf Coast of the United States in the summer of 2005, have highlighted the need to develop effective post-trauma psychotherapeutic intervention strategies, not only to deal with the immediate psychological aftermath of trauma, but also the long-term effects of anniversary reactions. Governmental responses to Hurricane Katrina relief were greatly criticized for disorganization and delay. Both immediately afterwards and in ensuing months, people's life needs often were not addressed. People-to-people individual and group grassroots efforts, including those provided by mental health professionals, however, did reach local communities to service immediate needs and long-term emotional reactions. The present paper describes one such effort designed to help survivors cope on the occasion of the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. Specifically, anniversary reaction group workshops were held to address unresolved emotional issues and to promote healing by encouraging belonging, comfort, security, and resilience. The ultimate goal of these wellness workshops was to assist participants in understanding and resolving their anniversary reactions. Preliminary quantitative and qualitative findings suggested that this workshop format helped participants face their anniversary reactions, address their related psychological sequelae, and deal with their physical displacement. Participants were then able to find the emotional strength to reattach, form new communities, and begin problem solving. These methods, with appropriate cultural modifications, were subsequently used in China, to assist Chinese mental health professionals prepare for the first anniversary of the Sichuan earthquake.     

Pleasant emotional induction broadens the visual world of young children

These experiments aimed at studying the influence of emotional context on global/local visual processing in children. Children 5 years old, known to present an immature global visual bias, and 8 years old, known to pay attention predominantly to global information, were placed in either a neutral or pleasant emotional context and subsequently presented with a global/local visual judgement task. As with previous findings for adults, both age groups presented a pronounced perceptual bias toward global information following exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, younger children, who do not present a global bias during the neutral exposure, presented the same preference for global information as older children when exposed to the pleasant context. These findings indicate that emotion may strongly affect visual perception in children, with important implications for educational practice and models of cognition.