Does impaired socioemotional functioning account for behavioral dysexecutive disorders? Evidence from a transnosological study

Behavioral dysexecutive disorders are highly prevalent in patients with neurological diseases but cannot be explained by cognitive dysexecutive impairments. In fact, the underlying mechanisms are poorly understood. Given that socioemotional functioning underlies appropriate behavior, socioemotional impairments may contribute to the appearance of behavioral disorders. To investigate this issue, we performed a transnosological study.

Seventy-five patients suffering from various neurological diseases (Alzheimer’s disease (AD), Parkinson’s disease (PD), frontotemporal lobar degeneration, and stroke) were included in the study. The patients were comprehensively assessed in terms of cognitive and behavioral dysexecutive disorders and socioemotional processes (facial emotion recognition and theory of mind). As was seen for cognitive and behavioral dysexecutive impairments, the prevalence of socioemotional impairments varied according to the diagnosis. Stepwise logistic regressions showed that (i) only cognitive executive indices predicted hypoactivity with apathy/abulia, (ii) theory of mind impairments predicted hyperactivity–distractibility–impulsivity and stereotyped/perseverative behaviors, and (iii) impaired facial emotion recognition predicted social behavior disorders. Several dysexecutive behavioral disorders are associated with an underlying impairment in socioemotional processes but not with cognitive indices of executive functioning (except for apathy). These results strongly suggest that some dysexecutive behavioral disorders are the outward signs of an underlying impairment in socioemotional processes.     

Providing information about diagnostic features at retrieval reduces false recognition

In the following study, participants encoded blocked DRM word lists and we varied whether they received information before test about the utility of mnemonic features that potentially discriminate between veridical and false memories. The results of three experiments revealed that this manipulation successfully reduced false recognition of critical theme words. We also found that this manipulation was effective for younger but not older adults. Furthermore, calling attention to the features in test instructions alone was sufficient for reducing false recognition and its effectiveness was not enhanced by also asking participants to rate their phenomenal experience. We argue that providing diagnostic information before test allows participants to establish more accurate expectations about the task and thus improves the efficacy of retrieval and monitoring processes that are subsequently engaged.     

Features and feedback: enhancing metamnemonic knowledge at retrieval reduces source-monitoring errors

Three experiments explored the issue of whether enhanced metamnemonic knowledge at retrieval can improve participants' ability to make difficult source discriminations in the context of the eyewitness suggestibility paradigm. The 1st experiment documented differences in phenomenal experience between veridical and false memories. Experiment 2 revealed that drawing participants' attention to these differences by pairing the ratings of the features with instructions about their utility was successful in reducing source misattributions of suggested items to the event. The results of Experiment 3 showed that participants can make online adjustments in the types of evidence used to make source judgments, as participants who received correct feedback during the training portion of the test reduced misattribution errors on the remainder of the test where feedback was not provided. Altogether, these studies suggest that people can discover and benefit from updated knowledge of the types of memorial evidence that discriminate between sources of information in memory.     

Presence and television.

Film and a number of emerging entertainment technologies offer media consumers an illusion of nonmediation known as presence. To investigate the possibility that television can evoke presence, 65 undergraduate students were shown brief examples of rapid point‐of‐view movement from commercially available videotapes on a television with either a small screen (12 inches [30.5 cm], measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches [116.8 cm]). Participants' responses were measured via a questionnaire and a computer‐based recording of arousal (electrodermal activity). Viewers of both televisions reported an enjoyable sense of physical movement, excitement, involvement, and a sense of participation. Furthermore, as predicted, participants who watched the large screen television thought the movement in the scenes was faster, experienced a greater sense of physical movement, enjoyed the movement to a greater extent, found the viewing experience more exciting, and were more physiologically aroused. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

On the influence of causal beliefs on the feeling of agency

The sense of agency is the experience of being the origin of a sensory consequence. This study investigates whether contextual beliefs modulate low-level sensorimotor processes which contribute to the emergence of the sense of agency. We looked at the influence of causal beliefs on ‘intentional binding’, a phenomenon which accompanies self-agency. Participants judged the onset-time of either an action or a sound which followed the action. They were induced to believe that the tone was either triggered by themselves or by somebody else, although, in reality, the sound was always triggered by the participants. We found that intentional binding was stronger when participants believed that they triggered the tone, compared to when they believed that another person triggered the tone. These results suggest that high-level contextual information influences sensorimotor processes responsible for generating intentional binding.     

Bragging About One's School Grades: Gender Stereotyping and Students' Perception of Their Abilities in Science,Mathematics, and Language

Three studies examined stereotypes about the abilities of women and men and their implications for self-evaluation. All the three studies suggest that women are generally perceived as better than men in language and that men are generally perceived as better than women in science and math. Furthermore, Study 1 reveals that female university students in psychology who believe that men are better than women in science feel significantly less able in science, have lower self-esteem, and report lower school average than students who do not believe that men are better than women in science. Study 2 shows that female high school students in a language career track rate their own ability in science less highly and report lower school grades in math when gender stereotypes are salient than when they are not. Study 3 shows that male university students in science tend to rate their own ability in language less highly and report significantly lower school grades in language when gender stereotypes are activated prior to their self-evaluation than when they are not. Overall, the findings suggest that gender stereotypes can have detrimental consequences for self-concept of ability of both male and female students. The theoretical and practical implications of these results are discussed. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Aversive learning overcomes appetitive innate responding in honeybees

Despite their miniature brain, honeybees have emerged as a powerful model for the study of learning and memory. Yet, they also exhibit innate responses to biologically relevant social signals such as pheromones. Here, we asked whether the bees’ developed learning capabilities allow them to overcome hardwired appetitive responses. Can they learn that attractant pheromones, that are not normally associated with a noxious stimulation in nature, predict the punishment of an electric shock? Immobilized honeybees were trained to discriminate two odorants, one that was paired with a shock and another that had no consequences. We measured whether they learned to produce aversive sting extension responses to the punished but not the non-punished odorant. One odorant was a neutral odor without innate value while the other was either an attractive pheromone (geraniol or citral) or an attractive floral odorant (phenylacetaldehyde). In all cases, bees developed a conditioned aversive response to the punished odorant, be it pheromone or not, and efficiently retrieved this information 1 h later. No learning asymmetries between odors were found. Thus, associative aversive learning in bees is strong enough to override preprogrammed responding, thus reflecting an impressive behavioral flexibility.     

Providing information about diagnostic features at retrieval reduces false recognition

In the following study, participants encoded blocked DRM word lists and we varied whether they received information before test about the utility of mnemonic features that potentially discriminate between veridical and false memories. The results of three experiments revealed that this manipulation successfully reduced false recognition of critical theme words. We also found that this manipulation was effective for younger but not older adults. Furthermore, calling attention to the features in test instructions alone was sufficient for reducing false recognition and its effectiveness was not enhanced by also asking participants to rate their phenomenal experience. We argue that providing diagnostic information before test allows participants to establish more accurate expectations about the task and thus improves the efficacy of retrieval and monitoring processes that are subsequently engaged.     

Benefits and limits of explicit counting for discriminating temporal intervals.

Segmenting information into smaller parts helps to process it, and this is also true for temporal information. The aim of the present article is to compare the benefits of using explicit counting in a temporal discrimination task under various marker-type conditions and to show the limits of this strategy. In Experiment 1, conditions with and without counting were compared for two implicit standard durations, .8 and 1.6 s, in connection with three marker-type conditions, which were intervals marked by: 1) two brief auditory signals (Auditory-Auditory); 2) two brief visual signals (Visual-Visual); and 3) one auditory signal followed by a visual signal (Auditory-Visual). At .8 s, marker-type differences are significant (best in audition, worse with a bimodal sequence), and remain present with an explicit counting strategy. At 1.6 s, explicit counting provides clear improvements of performance in all marker-type conditions and annihilates marker-related differences. Experiment 1 also suggests that standard deviation remains constant from .8 to 1.6 s in the counting condition, while Experiment 2 shows that when standard intervals are extended up to 4 s, explicit counting does not totally prevent variance from increasing as base duration becomes progressively longer. The benefits derived from using explicit counting in duration discrimination are argued to depend (1) on a reduction of variance in the memory process involved in the timing mechanism, and (2) on a change in the decisional process.