Positive Affect and Flexibility: Overcoming the Precedence of Global over Local Processing of Visual Information

Previous findings on the relationship between positive mood and global processing are often based on visual matching tasks that involve a choice between global and local strategies. Preferences for global processing in positive mood, however, do not imply a reduced ability to process locally. The present experiment tested the assumption that positive affect increases flexibility in cognitive processing as indicated by the ability to overcome global precedence, and to respond rapidly to non-dominant (local) features when the task necessitates it. Consistent with expectations, participants responded significantly faster to local targets after positive compared to neutral and negative prime words. The typical precedence of global over local processing observed after neutral and negative prime words was reversed after positive prime words. Findings support the assumption that positive affect increases cognitive flexibility. Furthermore, findings suggest that mood-related preferences in global versus local processing cannot be generalized to processing ability.     

Do attentional capacities and processing speed mediate the effect of age on executive functioning?

The executive processes are well known to decline with age, and similar data also exists for attentional capacities and processing speed. Therefore, we investigated whether these two last nonexecutive variables would mediate the effect of age on executive functions (inhibition, shifting, updating, and dual-task coordination). We administered a large battery of executive, attentional and processing speed tasks to 104 young and 71 older people, and we performed mediation analyses with variables showing a significant age effect. All executive and processing speed measures showed age-related effects while only the visual scanning task performance (selective attention) was explained by age when controlled for gender and educational level. Regarding mediation analyses, visual scanning partially mediated the age effect on updating while processing speed partially mediated the age effect on shifting, updating and dual-task coordination. In a more exploratory way, inhibition was also found to partially mediate the effect of age on the three other executive functions. Attention did not greatly influence executive functioning in aging while, in agreement with the literature, processing speed seems to be a major mediator of the age effect on these processes. Interestingly, the global pattern of results seems also to indicate an influence of inhibition but further studies are needed to confirm the role of that variable as a mediator and its relative importance by comparison with processing speed.     

Examining HPA-axis functioning as a mediator of the relationship between depression and cognition across the adult lifespan

Altered HPA-axis functioning is a hypothesized mechanism for worsened cognition in depression. The current study examines the indirect effects of depression on processing speed, executive functioning, and memory as a function of the HPA-axis. 38 individuals with a depression diagnosis and 50 healthy controls (HCs) aged 18–86 underwent neuropsychological testing and at-home diurnal salivary cortisol collection. Depression was assessed via structured clinical interviews and rating scales. Cognitive composite scores were derived from factor analysis. Daytime cortisol exposure was estimated using area under the curve (AUC). Depression was associated with higher cortisol levels and slower processing speed . A significant suppression effect of AUC was present on the relationship between depression and processing speed. Limitations include the cross-sectional design and limited sample heterogeneity. Though poorly modulated HPA-axis is one proposed mechanism of cognitive alterations in depression, our results did not support this conclusion for processing speed. Alternative mechanisms should be considered to inform interventions to target cognitive alterations in depression.     

Auditory processing deficits in children with reading and language impairments: can they (and should they) be treated?

Sixty-five children with specific reading disability (SRD), 25 children with specific language impairment (SLI), and 37 age-matched controls were tested for their frequency discrimination, rapid auditory processing, vowel discrimination, and consonant–vowel discrimination. Subgroups of children with SRD or SLI produced abnormal frequency discrimination (42%), rapid auditory processing (12%), vowel discrimination (23%), or consonant–vowel discrimination (18%) thresholds for their age. Twenty-eight of these children trained on a programme that targeted their specific auditory processing deficit for 6 weeks. Twenty-five of these 28 trainees produced normal thresholds for their targeted processing skill after training. These gains were not explained by gains in auditory attention, in the ability to do psychophysical tasks in general, or by test–retest effects. The 25 successful trainees also produced significantly higher scores on spoken language and spelling tests after training. However, an untrained control group showed test–retest effects on the same tests. These results suggest that auditory processing deficits can be treated successfully in children with SRD and SLI but that this does not help them acquire new reading, spelling, or spoken language skills.     

Synesthesia and number cognition in children

Grapheme-color synesthesia, when achromatic digits evoke an experience of a specific color (photisms), has been shown to be consistent, involuntary, and linked with number concept in adults, yet there have been no comparable investigations with children. We present a systematic study of grapheme-color synesthesia in children aged between 7 and 15 years. Here we show that such children (but not children with phoneme-color synesthesia) experience involuntary difficulties in numerical tasks when digits are presented in colors incongruent with their photisms. Synesthesia in children may thus have important consequences for certain aspects of numerical cognition.     

Food and token quantity discrimination in capuchin monkeys (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Cebus apella</Emphasis>)

Quantity discrimination is adaptive in a variety of ecological contexts and different taxa discriminate stimuli differing in numerousness, both in the wild and in laboratory settings. Quantity discrimination between object arrays has been suggested to be more demanding than between food arrays but, to our knowledge, the same paradigm has never been used to directly compare them. We investigated to what extent capuchin monkeys’ relative numerousness judgments (RNJs) with food and token are alike. Tokens are inherently non-valuable objects that acquire an associative value upon exchange with the experimenter. Our aims were (1) to assess capuchins’ RNJs with food (Experiment 1) and with tokens (Experiment 2) by presenting all the possible pair-wise choices between one to five items, and (2) to evaluate on which of the two proposed non-verbal mechanisms underlying quantity discrimination (analogue magnitude and object file system) capuchins relied upon. In both conditions capuchins reliably selected the larger amount of items, although their performance was higher with food than with tokens. The influence of the ratio between arrays on performance indicates that capuchins relied on the same system for numerical representation, namely analogue magnitude, regardless of the type of stimuli (food or tokens) and across both the small and large number ranges.     

Modality and domain specific components in auditory and visual working memory tasks

In the tripartite model of working memory (WM) it is postulated that a unique part system—the visuo-spatial sketchpad (VSSP)—processes non-verbal content. Due to behavioral and neurophysiological findings, the VSSP was later subdivided into visual object and visual spatial processing, the former representing objects’ appearance and the latter spatial information. This distinction is well supported. However, a challenge to this model is the question how spatial information from non-visual sensory modalities, for example the auditory one, is processed. Only a few studies so far have directly compared visual and auditory spatial WM. They suggest that the distinction of two processing domains—one for object and one for spatial information—also holds true for auditory WM, but that only a part of the processes is modality specific. We propose that processing in the object domain (the item’s appearance) is modality specific, while spatial WM as well as object-location binding relies on modality general processes.     

Effects of Performance Context on Processing Speed and Performance Ratings

The present study demonstrated that the presence of evaluatively polarized context performances not only produces contrast and halo effects on judgments of a target performance, but also causes judgments to be made much faster. Processing speed and positive halo were highly correlated, supporting the notion that halo in performance ratings results from raters' recall and use of a single, general impression. Furthermore, regression analyses demonstrated that processing speed mediates the relationship between context and halo. The relationship between these findings, halo, processing speed, and general impressions, as well as implications for performance appraisals, are discussed.     

Lexicality, morphological structure, and semantic transparency in the processing of German ver-verbs: The complementarity of on-line and off-line evidence

Two types of experiments investigate the visual on-line and off-line processing of German ver-verbs (e.g., verbittern ‘to embitter'). In Experiments 1 and 2 (morphological priming), latency patterns revealed the existence of facilitation effects for the morphological conditions (BITTER-VERBITTERN and BITTERN-VERBITTERN) as compared to the neutral conditions (SAUBER-VERBITTERN and SÄUBERN-VERBITTERN). In Experiments 3 and 4 (rating tasks) participants had to judge whether the target (VERBITTERN) “comes from,” “contains a form of,” or “contains the meaning of” the root (BITTER) or the root+en substring (BITTERN). Taken together, these studies revealed the combined influence of the three factors of lexicality (real word status), morphological structure, and semantic transparency.