Temporal reproductions are influenced by an internal reference: Explaining the Vierordt effect

Several findings from duration perception literature suggest that when making decisions about time, participants rely on an internal reference memory for time rather than merely on the current physical stimuli. According to a recent account, such an internal reference is formed by a continuous dynamic updating process that integrates duration information from previous trials and the current trial. In the present work, we show how such a dynamic mechanism can account for the classical yet unresolved Vierordt effect, which refers to the overestimation of relatively short and the underestimation of relatively long temporal intervals. We conducted an experiment to examine this and related predictions by means of a temporal reproduction task. Specifically, participants were presented with two successive time intervals — a standard s with constant duration and a comparison c with variable duration. Instead of performing a comparison judgment, however, the participants were subsequently cued to reproduce one of the two presented stimuli. Reproductions were affected not only by the temporal position of the to-be-reproduced stimulus, but also by the stimuli presented on earlier trials. These results support the notion of a dynamically updated internal reference underlying our judgments about the time elapsed, which might also be the basis of the Vierordt effect.     

Peer Relationships and Emotional Well-Being of Children with Sickle Cell Disease: A Controlled Replication

This study investigated the effects of stimulus presentation modality on working memory performance in elementary school-age children ages 7–13. The experimental paradigm implemented a multitrial learning task incorporating three presentation modalities: Auditory, Visual, and simultaneous Auditory plus Visual. The first experiment compared the learning and memory performance of older and younger elementary school children. The second experiment compared verbal learning and memory performance in elementary school children with major depressive disorder (MDD) to the performance of nondepressed children. All participants benefited from the pictorial presentation of information during learning and recall of information as compared to the auditory presentation alone. Both age and socioeconomic status affected working memory performance in typically developing children. Children with depression demonstrated a more passive learning style during the auditory list acquisition. The present study supports the pictorial superiority hypothesis in verbal learning tasks and the theory that working memory matures during elementary school years. Furthermore, current results indicate that complex working memory measures are not entirely independent of previous experience.     

Stimulus modality and working memory performance in Greek children with reading disabilities: Additional evidence for the pictorial superiority hypothesis

This study investigated the effects of stimulus presentation modality on working memory performance in children with reading disabilities (RD) and in typically developing children (TDC), all native speakers of Greek. It was hypothesized that the visual presentation of common objects would result in improved learning and recall performance as compared to the auditory presentation of stimuli. Twenty children, ages 10–12, diagnosed with RD were matched to 20 TDC age peers. The experimental tasks implemented a multitrial verbal learning paradigm incorporating three modalities: auditory, visual, and auditory plus visual. Significant group differences were noted on language, verbal and nonverbal memory, and measures of executive abilities. A mixed-model MANOVA indicated that children with RD had a slower learning curve and recalled fewer words than TDC across experimental modalities. Both groups of participants benefited from the visual presentation of objects; however, children with RD showed the greatest gains during this condition. In conclusion, working memory for common verbal items is impaired in children with RD; however, performance can be facilitated, and learning efficiency maximized, when information is presented visually. The results provide further evidence for the pictorial superiority hypothesis and the theory that pictorial presentation of verbal stimuli is adequate for dual coding.     

Effects of retrieval practice and presentation modality on verbal learning: testing the limits of the testing effect

ABSTRACT

The testing effect refers to improved memory after retrieval practice and has been researched primarily with visual stimuli. In two experiments, we investigated whether the testing effect can be replicated when the to-be-learned information is presented auditorily, or visually?+?auditorily. Participants learned Swahili-English word pairs in one of three presentation modalities – visual, auditory, or visual?+?auditory. This was manipulated between-participants in Experiment 1 and within-participants in Experiment2. All participants studied the word pairs during three study trials. Half of participants practiced recalling the English translations in response to the Swahili cue word twice before the final test whereas the other half simply studied the word pairs twice more. Results indicated an improvement in final test performance in the repeated test condition, but only in the visual presentation modality (Experiments 1 and 2) and in the visual?+?auditory presentation modality (Experiment 2). This suggests that the benefits of practiced retrieval may be limited to information presented in a visual modality.     

Hand–foot motor priming in the presence of temporary inability to use hands

To verify if the link between observed hand actions and executed foot actions found in aplasics is essentially induced by the constant use of foot substituting the hand, we investigated if the vision of a grasping hand is able to prime a foot response in normals. Participants were required to detect the time-to-contact of a hand grasping an object either with a suitable or a less suitable movement, an experimental paradigm known to induce a priming effect. Participants responded either with the hand or the foot, while having free or bound hands. Results showed that for hand responses motor priming effect was stronger when the hands were free, whereas for foot responses it was stronger when the hands were bound. These data are interpreted as a further evidence that a difficulty to move affects specific cognitive functions and that the vision of a grasping hand may prime a foot response.     

Beyond words: Sensory properties of depressive thoughts

Verbal thoughts (such as negative cognitions) and sensory phenomena (such as visual mental imagery) are usually conceptualised as distinct mental experiences. The present study examined to what extent depressive thoughts are accompanied by sensory experiences and how this is associated with symptom severity, insight of illness and quality of life. A large sample of mildly to moderately depressed patients (N = 356) was recruited from multiple sources and asked about sensory properties of their depressive thoughts in an online study. Diagnostic status and symptom severity were established over a telephone interview with trained raters. Sensory properties of negative thoughts were reported by 56.5% of the sample (i.e., sensation in at least one sensory modality). The highest prevalence was seen for bodily (39.6%) followed by auditory (30.6%) and visual (27.2%) sensations. Patients reporting sensory properties of thoughts showed more severe psychopathological symptoms than those who did not. The degree of perceptuality was marginally associated with quality of life. The findings support the notion that depressive thoughts are not only verbal but commonly accompanied by sensory experiences. The perceptuality of depressive thoughts and the resulting sense of authenticity may contribute to the emotional impact and pervasiveness of such thoughts, making them difficult to dismiss for their holder.     

Integration of spatial maps in pigeons

The integration of spatial maps in pigeons was investigated using a spatial analog to sensory preconditioning. The pigeons were tested in an open-field arena in which they had to locate hidden food among a 4×4 grid of gravel-filled cups. In phase 1, the pigeons were exposed to a consistent spatial relationship (vector) between landmark L (a red L-shaped block of wood), landmark T (a blue T-shaped block of wood) and the hidden food goal. In phase 2, the pigeons were then exposed to landmark T with a different spatial vector to the hidden food goal. Following phase 2, pigeons were tested with trials on which they were presented with only landmark L to examine the potential integration of the phase 1 and 2 vectors via their shared common elements. When these test trials were preceded by phase 1 and phase 2 reminder trials, pigeons searched for the goal most often at a location consistent with their integration of the LT phase 1 and Tphase 2 goal vectors. This result indicates that integration of spatial vectors acquired during phases 1 and 2 allowed the pigeons to compute a novel Lgoal vector. This suggests that spatial maps may be enlarged by successively integrating additional spatial information through the linkage of common elements.     

Different working memory capacity in normal young adults for visual and tactile letter recognition task

Thirty-nine young adult participants performing the visual and tactile n-back working memory task were compared. In the visual task, letters were presented on a computer screen and in the tactile task, plastic letters embedded on a board were explored tactually. The amount of incorrect responses increased with increasing memory load in both tasks, but was significantly lower in the visual task. Subgrouping the participants with extreme performances into "skilled" and "poor" performers showed that the best performance was found among "skilled" visual performers, and the worst one among "poor" tactile performers. There was more interindividual variation among tactile than visual performance. We conclude that tactile working memory capacity, measured here by letter recognition and letter memory, is generally more limited and shows more variability than visual memory in normal sighted participants.     

Time Perception: Modality and Duration Effects in Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

Time perception performance was systematically investigated in adolescents with and without attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). Specifically, the effects of manipulating modality (auditory and visual) and length of duration (200 and 1000 ms) were examined. Forty-six adolescents with ADHD and 44 controls were administered four duration discrimination tasks and two control tasks, and a set of standardized measures. Participants with ADHD had higher thresholds than controls on all of the duration discrimination tasks, with the largest effect size obtained on the visual 1000 ms duration discrimination task. No group differences were observed on the control tasks. Visual–spatial memory was found to be a significant predictor of visual and auditory duration discrimination at longer intervals (1000 ms) in the ADHD sample, whereas auditory verbal working memory predicted auditory discrimination at longer intervals (1000 ms) in the control sample. These group differences suggest impairments in basic timing mechanisms in ADHD.     

Liens entre le déclin sensoriel et cognitif dans le vieillissement normal : revue critique de la littérature et apports de l’approche incarnée et située de la cognition

Biological aging impacts many organs including sensory's ones and the brain, and thus, cognition. Research has shown that the sensory and cognitive decline are positively correlated. The main data from this literature are firstly reviewed in the present article. Then, the four main hypotheses that are generally proposed to explain these associations are presented. According to them, sensory decline is supposed to cause cognitive decline, or vice-versa, or these concomitant changes result from the general alteration of the nervous system. However, none of them seems able to account for all of the existing data. Moreover, the precise mechanisms that may drive these associations remain to be clarified. The rest of the article is then dedicated to the embodied and situated cognition approach as it provides a particularly interesting and adequate framework to account for these links. Indeed, according to this approach, cognitive representations are grounded in their sensorimotor properties. In other words, cognitive functioning is not conceived as detached from sensory functioning, but instead directly dependent of it. Representations are thus thought to emerge from the sensorimotor simulation of the properties involved in these representations. Therefore, sensory decline should directly impact cognitive performance. It is then hypothesized that older adults have low-resolution representations decreasing the signal on noise ratio of traces, increasing sensorimotor interferences and thus decreasing cognitive performance. This approach leads to consider low and high levels of sensory and perceptual functioning, which are both impaired in aging. Therefore, the repercussion of the sensory-perceptual decline is not only valid for present processing, but also extend to all past knowledge. Several predictions are then proposed on (1) the link between high-level perceptual functioning and cognitive functioning in older adults; (2) the possible interaction in young adults between sensory and high-level perceptual functioning as a function of the level of interference of the material involved; (3) the possible link between the motor and cognitive functioning in older adults. The clinical consequences in terms of cognitive stimulation of such a perspective will close the article. It is proposed to develop a stimulation program based on pattern separation mechanism to better process sensory interference in order to train older adults to improve cognitive precision and thus performance.