Amélioration de la qualité de vie au travail dans les unités de soins : la démarche ORSOSA

Improve the quality of working conditions is a major issue for healthcare workers who have to deal with productivity obligations and multiple procedures. Based on the magnet hospital concept, the ORSOSA study (prospective cohort study of 4000 helthcare workers) helped develop and validate a methodolody that allows to quickly diagnose the levels of psychological and organizational constraints (CPO) from the staff’s point of view / of the staff. The ORSOSA method relies on an organisational psychologist who launches a dynamic during the diagnostic feedback phase. He gets the team to appropriate the strengths and weaknesses and to rank their recommendations. This article presents an overview of the method and it the first stages of its evaluations.     

Tool use in left brain damage and Alzheimer's disease: What about function and manipulation knowledge?

Tool use disorders are usually associated with difficulties in retrieving function and manipulation knowledge. Here, we investigate tool use (Real Tool Use, RTU), function (Functional Association, FA) and manipulation knowledge (Gesture Recognition, GR) in 17 left‐brain‐damaged (LBD) patients and 14 AD patients (Alzheimer disease). LBD group exhibited predicted deficit on RTU but not on FA and GR while AD patients showed deficits on GR and FA with preserved tool use skills. These findings question the role played by function and manipulation knowledge in actual tool use.     

Both sheep and goats can solve inferential by exclusion tasks

Animal Cognition - Despite the domestication of sheep and goats by humans for several millennia, we still lack comparative data on their cognitive capacity. Comparing the cognitive skills of farm...     

Apraxia and Alzheimer’s Disease: Review and Perspectives

Apraxia is one of the cognitive deficits that characterizes Alzheimer’s disease. Despite its prevalence and relevance to diagnosing Alzheimer’s disease, this topic has received little attention and is without comprehensive review. The review herein is aimed to fill this gap by first presenting an overview of the impairment caused in different clinical situations: pantomime of tool use, single tool use, real tool use, mechanical problem solving, function and manipulation knowledge tasks, and symbolic/meaningless gestures. On the basis of these results, we then propose alternative interpretations regarding the nature of the underlying mechanisms impaired by the disease. Also presented are principal methodological issues precluding firm conclusions from being drawn.     

A cognitive-based model of tool use in normal aging

While several cognitive domains have been widely investigated in the field of aging, the age-related effects on tool use are still an open issue and hardly any studies on tool use and aging is available. A significant body of literature has indicated that tool use skills might be supported by at least two different types of knowledge, namely, mechanical knowledge and semantic knowledge. However, neither the contribution of these kinds of knowledge to familiar tool use, nor the effects of aging on mechanical and semantic knowledge have been explored in normal aging. The aim of the present study was to fill this gap. To do so, 98 healthy elderly adults were presented with three tasks: a classical, familiar tool use task, a novel tool use task assessing mechanical knowledge, and a picture matching task assessing semantic knowledge. The results showed that aging has a negative impact on tool use tasks and on knowledge supporting tool use skills. We also found that aging did not impact mechanical and semantic knowledge in the same way, confirming the distinct nature of those forms of knowledge. Finally, our results stressed that mechanical and semantic knowledge are both involved in the ability to use familiar tools.     

Tool use in neurodegenerative diseases: Planning or technical reasoning?

Recent works showed that tool use can be impaired in stroke patients because of either planning or technical reasoning deficits, but these two hypotheses have not yet been compared in the field of neurodegenerative diseases. The aim of this study was to address the relationships between real tool use, mechanical problem‐solving, and planning skills in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD, n = 32), semantic dementia (SD, n = 16), and corticobasal syndrome (CBS, n = 9). Patients were asked to select and use ten common tools, to solve three mechanical problems, and to complete the Tower of London test. Motor function and episodic memory were controlled using the Purdue Pegboard Test and the BEC96 questionnaire, respectively. A data‐transformation method was applied to avoid ceiling effects, and single‐case analysis was performed based on raw scores and completion time. All groups demonstrated either impaired or slowed tool use. Planning deficits were found only in the AD group. Mechanical problem‐solving deficits were observed only in the AD and CBS groups. Performance in the Tower of London test was the best predictor of tool use skills in the AD group, suggesting these patients had general rather than mechanical problem‐solving deficits. Episodic memory seemed to play little role in performance. Motor dysfunction tended to be associated with tool use skills in CBS patients, while tool use disorders are interpreted as a consequence of the semantic loss in SD in line with previous works. These findings may encourage caregivers to set up disease‐centred interventions.     

Preschoolers are able to take merit into account when distributing goods

Classic studies in developmental psychology demonstrate a relatively late development of equity, with children as old as 6 or even 8-10 years failing to follow the logic of merit--that is, giving more to those who contributed more. Following Piaget (1932), these studies have been taken to indicate that judgments of justice develop slowly and follow a stagelike progression, starting off with simple rules (e.g., equality: everyone receives the same) and only later on in development evolving into more complex ones (e.g., equity: distributions match contributions). Here, we report 2 experiments with 3- and 4-year-old children (N = 195) that contradict this constructivist account. Our results demonstrate that children as young as 3 years old are able to take merit into account by distributing tokens according to individual contributions but that this ability may be hidden by a preference for equality.