Attentional distraction and time perception in children

The purpose of the present study was to test the effect of attentional distraction on temporal bisection performance in 5‐ and 8‐year‐old children. During a first learning phase, children were trained to discriminate on a temporal bisection task a short standard duration (2 sec) from a long one (8 sec), presented as visual stimuli. Later, in a second testing phase, intermediate durations (3, 4, 5, 6, 7 s), including the standard durations, were presented. Children's task still was to report if it was a short standard duration or a long one. In addition, during the non‐standard duration, a distracter either did or did not appear. Results showed increasing proportions of “it is the long standard duration” (response “long”) with increasing stimulus durations in both distracter and non‐distracter conditions. However, psychophysical functions were flatter in the 5‐year‐olds than in the 8‐year‐olds, revealing their lower sensibility to time. Nevertheless, the 5‐year‐olds' proportion of long responses was higher under the distracter than in the non‐distracter condition. Consequently, the point of subjective equality (PSE), corresponding to the stimulus duration to which the subject produced 50% of responses of “long” was lower under the distracter condition as compared to the non‐distracter condition. Conversely, for the 8‐year‐olds, the PSE was significantly higher in the distracter than in the non‐distracter condition. Five‐year old children overestimated the time in the presence of an attentional distracter, whereas 8‐year olds tended to underestimate it. The leftward shift and the rightward shift of the PSE in the 5‐ and the 8‐year‐olds, respectively, were accounted for by limited‐capacity attention in the five‐year olds.     

Learned associability and associative change in human causal learning.

The Mackintosh (1975) model of associative learning specifies that processing of both the cues presented on a trial and the outcome of that trial will interact to determine the amount of associative change undergone by a given cue. Experiments looking at the distribution of associative change among the elements of a reinforced compound in animal conditioning studies indicate that processing of the outcome of a trial does indeed influence associative change. The work reported here investigates the distribution of associative change among the elements of a reinforced compound in a human causal judgement paradigm, and it indicates that processing of the cues presented on a trial also plays a role in determining associative change (in terms of changes in the associability of cues as a result of experience). Taken in combination, these results provide good support for Mackintosh (1975) and the characterizations of both cue and outcome processing that it offers.     

Effect of normal aging on the manipulation of information in working memory

The goal of this study is to examine the central executive of working memory in normal aging, specifically focusing on its capacities to manipulate or modify the format of the to-be-recalled material. The central executive was measured with the alphabetical span procedure, during which subjects were asked to recall a random series of words in their alphabetical order. The storage demand was equalized across subjects by adjusting the list lengths according to individual span. Experiments 1, 2, and 3 showed that elderly subjects were not impaired in manipulating information, relative to young controls, even when the difficulty of the task was increased. In Experiment 4, validity was tested by asking young subjects to perform the task under the conditions of full or divided attention. Alphabetical recall was more impaired than direct recall during the divided attention condition, which suggests a larger involvement of the central executive component in the former. These results are discussed in relation to the hypothesis of a central executive impairment being associated with normal aging.     

A methodological study in a space flight simulation context]

To study the effects of isolation and confinement on small groups during long space flights, it is habitual to use closed hyperbaric ground chambers. For the first time, the European Space Agency made use of a nautral environment taking advantage of an Antarctic winter-over at the French Dumont d'Urville Station. The main objective of that study ("International Antarctic Psychological Programme"), was to compare different Russian tests used for training cosmonauts to a W. European approach validated during previous winter studies and European ground chamber simulations. Russian techniques appeared to be oriented to a narrow range of phenomena and unsuited to discern the adjustment to stress conditions.     

Definiteness and voice in the interpretation of active and passive sentences

In Experiment I, subjects were given active and passive sentences where the definiteness of nominals is varied and about which uncertainty was expressed, e.g. “I thought that the policeman had been injured by a gangster, but I was mistaken, in fact.”. Their task was to decide what was the target of the mistake by completing freely the sentence in such a way that the account would be corrected. When the nominals are differentially determined (a-the, the-a), the pattern of responses indicates that, for both active and passive, subjects were more likely to conclude that it was the non-definitely marked nominal that had been involved in the mistake rather than the definitely marked one. When both nominals are similarly determined (a-a, the-the), subjects were more likely to indicate the event itself as having been involved in the mistake. This supports the hypothesis that subjects are able to utilize definiteness to determine the relation between presupposed and assertional information. In Experiment II, subjects were given paired active and passive sentences with differentially determined nominals and were required to choose between the two syntactic forms of each pair the one they would prefer to use. The pattern of responses clearly shows that subjects were more likely to choose the voice allowing the hypothesized preferential order “Definitely marked grammatical subject-non-definitely marked grammatical object”. Passive transformational rule is thus interpreted as a particular case of a more general rule specifying the ways in which what is made known (comment) is nested on to what is already assumed to be the case (topic).     

A l'occasion du renouvellement de l'annee

Sans résumé     

Links Among Cognitive Empathy,Theory of Mind,and Affective Perspective Taking by Young Children

The authors investigated the development of the affective, cognitive, and behavioral components of empathy in preschoolers, specifically examining how cognitive empathy is linked to theory of mind and affective perspective taking. Participants were 158 children aged 4–6 years. They listened to narratives and then answered questions about the protagonists' emotions. The affective component was probed with the question, “How do you feel seeing the little girl/boy?”; the cognitive component with the question, “Why do you feel [emotion shared with the character]?”; and the behavioral one with the question, “What would you do if you were next to the little boy/girl [experiencing an emotional scenario]?” Results revealed a developmental sequence in the self-focused attribution of cognitive empathy, and a trend toward a developmental sequence for behavioral empathy, which underwent a slight linear increase between 4 and 6 years old. Affective empathy remained stable. More interestingly, they showed that cognitive empathy is linked to both theory of mind and affective perspective taking.