Negative priming effect after inhibition of weight/number interference in a Piaget-like task

Piagetian tasks have more to do with the child's ability to inhibit interference than they do with the ability to grasp their underlying logic. Here we used a chronometric paradigm with 11-year-olds, who succeed in Piaget's conservation-of-weight task, to test the role of cognitive inhibition in a priming version of this classical task. The experimental design was such that the misleading strategy “number-equals-weight” to inhibit on the prime (a Piaget-like item with weight/number interference) became a congruent strategy to activate on the probe (a subsequent item where weight and number covaried). A negative priming effect of 142 ms was observed for the prime-probe sequence. This result is consistent with the prediction that success on Piaget-like tasks (the prime) requires an inhibition process.     

A Domain-General Theory of the Development of Perceptual Discrimination

ABSTRACT— In this article, we posit a domain-general principle that may account for the improvement that is observed in several aspects of perceptual development over the first years of life. Development during this time frame is characterized by a process of perceptual narrowing, whereby the discrimination of perceptual information is broadly tuned at first and then declines to more selective levels with experience. This process appears to cut across both the visual and auditory modalities and may reflect the development of a common neural architecture.     

On perturbation and pattern coexistence in postural coordination dynamics

In studies of postural control, investigators have used either experimentally induced perturbations to stance or unperturbed stance. The distinction between perturbed and unperturbed stance has gained renewed importance in the context of inphase and antiphase coordination of the hips and ankles. Several contributions have replicated the findings published over the past decade, suggesting the possibility of a unified view of postural control. However, any proposed unified view depends on how so called perturbed and unperturbed are defined. The authors argue that, to date, there is no explicit and general definition of those terms. The main reason is that all perturbations are relative and depend on appropriate frames of reference for perception and action. Arguments about empirical or theoretical unification of perturbed and unperturbed stance are premature.     

You Want to Know the Truth? Then Don't Mimic!

ABSTRACT— Mimicry facilitates the ability to understand what other people are feeling. The present research investigated whether this is also true when the expressions that are being mimicked do not reflect the other person's true emotions. In interactions, targets either lied or told the truth, while observers mimicked or did not mimic the targets' facial and behavioral movements. Detection of deception was measured directly by observers' judgments of the extent to which they thought the targets were telling the truth and indirectly by observers' assessment of targets' emotions. The results demonstrated that nonmimickers were more accurate than mimickers in their estimations of targets' truthfulness and of targets' experienced emotions. The results contradict the view that mimicry facilitates the understanding of people's felt emotions. In the case of deceptive messages, mimicry hinders this emotional understanding.     

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.