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The fixation effect is known as one of the most dominant of the cognitive biases against creativity and limits individuals' creative capacities in contexts of idea generation. Numerous techniques and tools have been established to help overcome these cognitive biases in various disciplines ranging from neuroscience to design sciences. Several works in the developmental cognitive sciences have discussed the importance of inhibitory control and have argued that individuals must first inhibit the spontaneous ideas that come to their mind so that they can generate creative solutions to problems. In line with the above discussions, in the present study, we performed an experiment on one hundred undergraduates from the Faculty of Psychology at Paris Descartes University, in which we investigated a minimal executive feedback-based learning process that helps individuals inhibit intuitive paths to solutions and then gradually drive their ideation paths toward creativity. Our results provide new insights into novel forms of creative leadership for idea generation.

International audience; Prospective memory (PM) refers to our ability to realize delayed intentions. In event-based PM paradigms, participants must act on an intention when they detect the occurrence of a pre-established cue. Some theorists propose that in such paradigms PM responding can only occur when participants deliberately initiate processes for monitoring their environment for appropriate cues. Others propose that perceptual processing of PM cues can directly trigger PM responding in the absence of strategic monitoring, at least under some circumstances. In order to address this debate, we present a computational model implementing the latter account, using a parallel distributed processing (interactive activation) framework. In this model PM responses can be triggered directly as a result of spreading activation from units representing perceptual inputs. PM responding can also be promoted by top-down monitoring for PM targets. The model fits a wide variety of empirical findings from PM paradigms, including the effect of maintaining PM intentions on ongoing response time and the intention superiority effect. The model also makes novel predictions concerning the effect of stimulus degradation on PM performance, the shape of response time distributions on ongoing and prospective memory trials, and the effects of instructing participants to make PM responses instead of ongoing responses or alongside them. These predictions were confirmed in two empirical experiments. We therefore suggest that PM should be considered to result from the interplay between bottom-up triggering of PM responses by perceptual input, and top-down monitoring for appropriate cues. We also show how the model can be extended to simulate encoding new intentions and subsequently deactivating them, and consider links between the model's performance and results from neuroimaging. Citation: Gilbert SJ, Hadjipavlou N, Raoelison M (2013) Automaticity and Control in Prospective Memory: A Computational Model. PLoS ONE 8(3): e59852.

School-aged children erroneously think that 1.45 is larger 1.5 because 45 is larger than 5. Using a negative priming paradigm, we investigated whether the ability to compare the magnitude of decimal numbers in the context in which the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (1.45 vs. 1.5) is rooted in part on the ability to inhibit the "greater the number of digits the greater its magnitude" misconception derived from a property of whole numbers. In Experiment 1, we found a typical negative priming effect with 7th graders requiring more time to compare decimal numbers in which the largest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (1.65 vs. 1.5) after comparing decimal numbers in which the smallest number has the greatest number of digits after the decimal point (1.45 vs. 1.5) than after comparing decimal numbers with the same number of digits after the decimal point (1.5 vs. 1.6). In Experiment 2, we found a negative priming effect when decimal numbers preceded items in which 7th graders had to compare the length of two lines. Taken together our results suggest that the ability to compare decimal numbers in which the smallest number has the greatest number of digits is rooted in part on the ability to inhibit the "greater the number of digits the greater its magnitude" misconception and in part on the ability to inhibit the length of the decimal number per se.

International audience; Although the functional brain network involved in reading for adults and children is now well documented, a critical lack of knowledge still exists about the structural development of these brain areas. To provide a better overview of the structural dynamics of the brain that sustain reading acquisition, we acquired anatomical MRI brain images from 55 children that were divided into two groups: one prior to the formal learning of reading (n = 33, 5-6 years old) and the second a few years after formal learning (n = 22, 9-10 years old). Reading performances were collected based on the ''Alouette-R'' test, a standardized test for reading text in French. Voxel-based morphometry analysis of gray matter showed that only the right insula volume was different between the two groups. Moreover, the reading group showed that the volumes of the left fusiform gyrus (corresponding to the well-known visual word form area, VWFA), the anterior part of the left inferior occipital gyrus and the left thalamus were significantly modulated by reading performance. This study reinforces the crucial role of the Visual Word Form Area in reading and correlation analyses performed between ROIs volumes suggesting that the VWFA is fully connected with the traditional left-hemispheric language brain network.