Source monitoring in Alzheimer's Disease

Source monitoring is the process of making judgments about the origin of memories. There are three categories of source monitoring: reality monitoring (discrimination between self- versus other-generated sources), external monitoring (discrimination between several external sources), and internal monitoring (discrimination between two types of self-generated sources). We investigated whether Alzheimer's Disease (AD) patients, when compared with young and older adults, are impaired at the same level on the three source monitoring categories. We designed three tasks, one for each source monitoring category. In the first task, aimed at reality monitoring, participants had to remember whether objects were previously placed in a bag by themselves or by the experimenter. In the second task, assessing external monitoring, participants had to remember whether the experimenter had previously placed objects in the bag with a black or white gloved hand. In the third task, measuring internal monitoring, participants had to remember whether they had previously placed or imagined themselves placing objects in the bag. Participants showed worse performances in the external and internal monitoring tasks, when compared with reality monitoring. The external monitoring deficit was even more pronounced in AD patients. Regression analyses showed that variation in the external monitoring performances was reliably predicted by inhibition. Our results emphasize the role of inhibitory processes in AD patients' source monitoring decline. The close relation between source and inhibitory decline in AD is interpreted in terms of a common neural base for both concepts.     

Discrepancy between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency: Implications for sense of agency and its disorders

The sense of agency refers to the feeling of authorship that “I am the one who is controlling external events through my own action”. A distinction between explicit judgement of agency and implicit feeling of agency has been proposed theoretically. However, there has not been sufficient experimental evidence to support this distinction. We have assessed separate explicit and implicit agency measures in the same population and investigated their relationships. Intentional binding task was employed as an implicit measure and self-other attribution task as an explicit measure, which are known to reflect clinical symptoms of disorders in the sense of agency. The results of the implicit measure and explicit measure were not correlated, suggesting dissociation of the explicit judgement of agency and the implicit feeling of agency.     

Metacognition of agency and theory of mind in adults with high functioning autism

We investigated metacognition of agency in adults with high functioning autism or Asperger Syndrome (HFA/AS) using a computer task in which participants moved the mouse to get the cursor to touch the downward moving X’s and avoid the O’s. They were then asked to make judgments of performance and judgments of agency. Objective control was either undistorted, or distorted by adding turbulence (i.e., random noise) or a time Lag between the mouse and cursor movements. Participants with HFA/AS used sensorimotor cues available in the turbulence and lag conditions to a lesser extent than control participants in making their judgments of agency. Furthermore, the failure to use these internal diagnostic cues to their own agency was correlated with decrements in a theory of mind task. These findings suggest that a reduced sensitivity to veridical internal cues about the sense of agency is related to mentalizing impairments in autism.     

元认知监测与算术知识制约小学儿童心算策略运用能力的发展:一年纵向考察

为探究元认知监测与算术知识对儿童心算策略运用能力的影响如何随个体发展而变化，采用计算机任务与纸笔测量的方法，对85名小学三、五年级儿童进行了历时一年的纵向追踪研究。研究发现：（1）两组儿童的元认知监测和算术知识均呈增长趋势，算术知识的增长速度五年级显著快于三年级，且元认知监测增长速度与算术知识增长速度显著相关；（2）两组儿童中，元认知监测与算术知识增长速度更快的个体策略执行反应时与错误率的减少速度也更快；（3）五年级儿童的算术知识在元认知监测影响策略选择发展中起着完全中介作用。     

Alterations in error-related brain activity and post-error behavior over time

This study examines the relation between the error-related negativity (ERN) and post-error behavior over time in healthy young adults (N=61). Event-related brain potentials were collected during two sessions of an identical flanker task. Results indicated changes in ERN and post-error accuracy were related across task sessions, with more negative ERN associated with greater improvements in post-error accuracy. This relationship was independent of any cross-sectional relationships between overall task performance, individual difference factors, including personality and self-efficacy, and indices of self-regulatory action monitoring. These results indicate that the relation between ERN and post-error accuracy remains intact and consistent regardless of variation in this set of individual difference factors previously associated with both of these indices of self-regulatory action monitoring, providing support for the strength, robustness, and persistence of this relationship in the process of adaptively controlling behavior to enhance task performance.     

Reconceptualising parental monitoring within a model of goal-directed parental action

The concept and operationalisation of parental monitoring in adolescent behavioural research is idiosyncratic, and often conflates multiple concepts. This hinders study and understanding of its role in the distinct processes of adolescent development and behaviour. This paper introduces a model of Goal-Directed Parental Action, applied to adolescent crime, in order to situate and thus define the concept of parental monitoring. This model draws on Situational Action Theory to both prioritise motivation and specify a parental action process. This process distinguishes parental goals from the means by which to achieve them and from the knowledge gathering required to evaluate progress towards such goals. Within this framework, parental monitoring is defined as the employment of active information-gathering behaviours by parents to help them to gain knowledge about and evaluate their child's progress towards a range of parentally selected developmental and behavioural goals. In addition to facilitating this definition of parental monitoring, the model of Goal-Directed Parental Action has future potential to clarify other parenting concepts and processes.