The ideomotor approach to imitative learning (IMAIL) in infancy: Challenges and future perspectives

The article presents the ideomotor approach to imitative learning (IMAIL). According to IMAIL, imitation rests on the acquisition of bidirectional action–effect associations through the observations of others’ actions and their sensory consequences. The article first outlines the challenges and demands that motivated the development of the theory. Then, it describes the theory in greater detail and presents empirical evidence supporting IMAIL. Finally, it concludes by discussing challenges and avenues for further research.     

Elimination of the enhanced Simon effect for older adults in a three-choice situation: Ageing and the Simon effect in a go/no-go Simon task

In a Simon task, participants show better performance when the irrelevant stimulus location corresponds with the response location than when it does not, and this effect is typically greater for older adults than for younger adults. To study the effect of cognitive ageing in the Simon task, we compared young and old adults using two versions of the Simon task: (a) a standard visual Simon task, for which participants respond with left and right key-presses to the red and green colours of stimuli presented in left and right locations; (b) a go/no-go version of the Simon task, which was basically the same, except that the shape of the stimulus in one third of the trials indicates that no response is to be made. In both tasks, both age groups showed the Simon effect. The magnitude of the effect for the standard Simon task was greater for the older adults than for the younger adults. Nevertheless, the two groups showed an equivalent Simon effect in the go/no-go version of the Simon task. Reaction time distribution analyses revealed basically similar functions for both age groups: a decreasing pattern of the Simon effect in the standard task and an increasing pattern of the effect in the go/no-go version of the task. The results suggest that older adults find it more difficult to suppress an automatic activation of the corresponding response, though this automatic activation was reduced in situations where the response was frequently inhibited.     

No commonality between attentional capture and attentional blink

Visual search for a unique target is impaired when a salient distractor is presented (attentional capture). This phenomenon is said to occur because attention is diverted to a distractor before it reaches the target. Similarly, perception of the second of two targets embedded in a rapid stream of nontargets is impaired, suggesting attentional deprivation due to the processing of the first target (attentional blink). We examined whether these phenomena emerge from a common underlying attentional mechanism by using correlation studies. If these phenomena share a common foundation, the magnitude of these deficits should show within-subject correlations. Participants (N?=?135) revealed significant attentional deficits during spatial and temporal capture and the attentional blink tasks. However, no significant correlation was found among these tasks. Experiment 2 (N?=?95) replicated this finding using the same procedure as that used in Experiment 1 but included another attentional blink task that required spatial switching between the two targets. Strong correlations emerged only between the two attentional blink tasks (with/without spatial switching). The present results suggest that attentional deficits during spatial and temporal capture and the attentional blink tasks reflect different aspects of attention.     

Recruitment of lateral rostral prefrontal cortex in spontaneous and task-related thoughts

Behavioural and neuroimaging studies suggest that spontaneous and task-related thought processes share common cognitive mechanisms and neural bases. Lateral rostral prefrontal cortex (RPFC) is a brain region that has been implicated both in spontaneous thought and in high-level cognitive control processes, such as goal/subgoal integration and the manipulation of self-generated thoughts. We therefore propose that the recruitment of lateral RPFC may follow a U-shaped function of cognitive demand: relatively high in low-demand situations conducive to the emergence of spontaneous thought, and in high-demand situations depending on processes supported by this brain region. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activity while healthy participants performed two tasks, each with three levels of cognitive demands, in a block design. The frequency of task-unrelated thoughts, measured by questionnaire, was highest in the low cognitive demand condition. Low and high cognitive demand conditions were each compared to the intermediate level. Lateral RPFC and superior parietal cortex were recruited in both comparisons, with additional activations specific to each contrast. These results suggest that RPFC is involved both when (a) task demands are low, and the mind wanders, and (b) the task requires goal/subgoal integration and manipulation of self-generated thoughts.     

Integrating working memory capacity and context-processing views of cognitive control

Individuals low in working memory capacity (WMC) exhibit impaired performance on a variety of cognitive control tasks. The executive-attention theory of WMC (Engle & Kane, [2004[) accounts for these findings as failures of goal maintenance and response conflict resolution. Similarly, the context-processing view (Braver et al., [2001]) provides an explanation of cognitive control deficits observed in schizophrenia patients and older adults that is based on the ability to maintain context information. Instead of maintenance deficits, the inhibition view (Hasher, Lustig, & Zacks, [2007]) states that older adults and individuals low in WMC primarily have an impairment in the ability to inhibit information. In the current experiment, we explored the relationships among these theories. Individuals differing in performance on complex span measures of WMC performed the AX-Continuous Performance Test to measure context-processing performance. High-WMC individuals were predicted to maintain the context afforded by the cue, whereas low-WMC individuals were predicted to fail to maintain the context information. Low-WMC individuals made more errors on AX and BX trials and were slower to respond correctly on AX, BX, and BY trials. The overall pattern of results is most consistent with both the executive-attention and context-processing theories of cognitive control.     

Age effects shrink when motor learning is predominantly supported by nondeclarative,automatic memory processes: Evidence from golf putting

Can motor learning be equivalent in younger and older adults? To address this question, 48 younger (M?=?23.5 years) and 48 older (M?=?65.0 years) participants learned to perform a golf-putting task in two different motor learning situations: one that resulted in infrequent errors or one that resulted in frequent errors. The results demonstrated that infrequent-error learning predominantly relied on nondeclarative, automatic memory processes whereas frequent-error learning predominantly relied on declarative, effortful memory processes: After learning, infrequent-error learners verbalized fewer strategies than frequent-error learners; at transfer, a concurrent, attention-demanding secondary task (tone counting) left motor performance of infrequent-error learners unaffected but impaired that of frequent-error learners. The results showed age-equivalent motor performance in infrequent-error learning but age deficits in frequent-error learning. Motor performance of frequent-error learners required more attention with age, as evidenced by an age deficit on the attention-demanding secondary task. The disappearance of age effects when nondeclarative, automatic memory processes predominated suggests that these processes are preserved with age and are available even early in motor learning.     

On the time course of exogenous cueing effects in bilinguals: Higher proficiency in a second language is associated with more rapid endogenous disengagement

Previous investigations have demonstrated a bilingual advantage on various aspects of executive control. It remains unclear how the language proficiency of bilinguals might relate to the mechanisms involved in attentional disengagement. In the present investigation, we tested the hypothesis that high bilingual proficiency would lead to a more rapid endogenous disengagement of attention from task-irrelevant peripheral cues. We predicted that more rapid attentional disengagement would result in an earlier appearance of inhibition of return (IOR). In this study Hindi–English bilinguals who differed in their L2 (English) proficiency participated in a target detection task. Visual targets were preceded by uninformative peripheral cues at various stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) allowing for us to visualize the time course of cue-related facilitation and inhibition. High-proficient Hindi–English bilinguals showed an earlier appearance of IOR than did low-proficient bilinguals, suggesting increased efficiency in disengagement of attention from task-irrelevant inputs. Furthermore, consistent with the “global” advantage that characterizes bilinguals in many tasks, the high-proficient group outperformed low-proficient bilinguals in overall reaction time.     

Cognitive processing of moral and social judgements: A comparison of offenders,students, and control participants

Examining cognitive processes related to offenders’ moral and social judgements is important in order to better understand their criminal behaviour. In the present study, 30 offenders, 30 students, and 24 control participants were administered the moral-conventional judgements computer task, which requires responding under strict time constraints. Participants read scenarios and were asked to judge whether the act was acceptable or unacceptable when rules were either assumed or removed. Additionally, participants completed an executive function (EF) task in order to examine the relation between EF and moral and social judgements. The findings revealed that, as expected, controls and students had faster reaction times (RTs) and a higher percentage of normative judgements than offenders. Additionally, offenders had a low percentage of normative judgements, particularly in the conventional rule removed condition. Finally, RTs of moral and conventional judgements in most conditions were related to EF among students but not controls or offenders. We conclude that offenders, as compared to controls and students, may rely more on rule-oriented responding and may rely less on EF when making moral and social judgements.     

Categorization behaviour in adults,adolescents, and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder adolescents: A comparative investigation

Although significant progress has been made with respect to our understanding of categorization and concept learning behaviour in adults, much less is known about how this key capacity plays out with respect to more restrictive populations. This is unfortunate because much may be revealed about the nature of concept learning by examining the limits exhibited by special populations. With this tenet in mind, in what follows, we investigated key aspects of concept learning in terms of the unexplored comparative performance of three populations—adults, adolescents, and adolescents with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). To do so, we employed a novel parainformative experimental task involving categorical stimuli with four objects defined over three dimensions. The learning difficulty ordering for these types of three-dimensional stimuli has proven robust and has been replicated by several researchers. Indeed, in our experiment, we observed the same concept learning ordering in adults and adolescents, but not in ADHD adolescents: For example, the latter group showed greatly impaired categorization performance on stimuli characterized by an “exclusive-or” rule. However, categorization performance on such type of stimuli indicated good reliability in discriminating between adolescents with and without ADHD (receiver-operating characteristic, ROC?=?.82). We accurately predicted and accounted for these results using generalized invariance structure theory (GIST; Vigo, 2013. The GIST of concepts. Cognition, 129, 138–162), which posits that organisms detect invariance patterns in stimuli that are necessary precursors to concept formation.     

Task instructions determine the visuospatial and verbal–spatial nature of number–space associations

Evidence for number–space associations comes from the spatial–numerical association of response codes (SNARC) effect, consisting in faster reaction times to small/large digits with the left/right hand, respectively. Two different proposals are commonly discussed concerning the cognitive origin of the SNARC effect: the visuospatial account and the verbal–spatial account. Recent studies have provided evidence for the relative dominance of verbal–spatial over visuospatial coding mechanisms, when both mechanisms were directly contrasted in a magnitude comparison task. However, in these studies, participants were potentially biased towards verbal–spatial number processing by task instructions based on verbal–spatial labels. To overcome this confound and to investigate whether verbal–spatial coding mechanisms are predominantly activated irrespective of task instructions, we completed the previously used paradigm by adding a spatial instruction condition. In line with earlier findings, we could confirm the predominance of verbal–spatial number coding under verbal task instructions. However, in the spatial instruction condition, both verbal–spatial and visuospatial mechanisms were activated to an equal extent. Hence, these findings clearly indicate that the cognitive origin of number–space associations does not always predominantly rely on verbal–spatial processing mechanisms, but that the spatial code associated with numbers is context dependent.