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Affiliation is a basic human need, especially during difficult times. To what extent did the need to affiliate limit our capacity to abide by health guidelines, in particular regarding social distancing, during the COVID-19 pandemic? We investigated this issue using questionnaire data from two samples of the French population collected during the first French lockdown (April-May 2020). We found that in men, higher social comparison orientation (sensitivity to the needs of others and inclination to help) and higher perceived threat increased the frequency of reported affiliative activities. At the same time, men's reported affiliative activities were associated with a lower reported intention to abide by lockdown and protective measures and lower levels of reported compliance. This pattern was not found in women. The women in our samples, as has been observed elsewhere, were largely compliant, potentially precluding any effects of affiliative needs. Basic though they may seem, affiliative needs and reported affiliative activities may have played a significant role in the implementation of sanitary guidelines during the COVID-19 pandemic., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2024 Dezecache et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

Several models of working memory (WM), the cognitive system devoted to the temporary maintenance of a small amount of information in view of its treatment, assume that these two functions of storage and processing share a common and limited resource. However, the predictions issued from these models concerning this resource-sharing remain usually qualitative, and at which precise extent these functions are affected by their concurrent implementation remains undecided. The aim of the present study was to quantify this resource sharing by expressing storage and processing performance during a complex span task in terms of the proportion of the highest level of performance each participant was able to reach (i.e., their span) in each component when performed in isolation. Two experiments demonstrated that, despite substantial dual-task decrements, participants managed to preserve half or more of their best performance in both components, testifying for a remarkable robustness of the human cognitive system. The implications of these results for the main WM models are discussed., (© 2024. The Author(s).)

The continuous flow of information in which we are immersed obliges our cognitive system to maintain accessible the relevant elements for the time necessary for their processing. The present study investigated how working memory balances the resource demands of this necessary storage in the face of demanding processing. In four experiments using a complex span task, we examined the residual performance in memory and processing of individuals who performed at their best in the other component. Reciprocal dual-task costs pointed toward a resource sharing between the two functions. However, whereas prioritizing processing almost abolished participants' memory performance, more than 60% of their processing capacities were preserved while maintaining memory performance at span. We argue that this asymmetry might be adaptive in nature. Working memory might have evolved as an action-oriented system in which short-term memory capacity is structurally limited to spare the resources needed for processing the information it holds. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Background: Early palliative care (EPC) leads to an improvement in quality of life and an unexpected survival benefit compared with oncological care for patients with metastatic lung cancer. The Early Palliative Integrated Care (EPIC) is aimed at examining whether EPC can improve overall survival in patients with metastatic upper gastrointestinal cancer., Methods: We performed a multicentre, open-label, randomised phase-3 trial. Eligible patients were ≥18 years, had metastatic upper gastrointestinal cancer and a performance status of 0-2. Patients from 19 French centres were randomly assigned between 10/10/2016 and 17/12/2021 to receive EPC plus oncological care or standard oncological care (SOC) alone. EPC was provided by palliative care physicians and included five EPC visits scheduled every month, starting within 3 weeks after randomisation. The primary endpoint was overall survival, analysed by intention-to-treat. This study was registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT02853474)., Findings: 470 patients were randomised: 233 and 237 patients in the EPC and SOC groups, respectively. In the EPC group, 216/233 patients (92.7%) underwent ≥1EPC visit, with 159 EPC visits per protocol (68.2%). The median follow-up duration was 46 months. We did not observe any overall survival difference between the EPC (median = 7.0 months [95% confidence interval, 6.1-8.8]) and SOC groups (8.6 months [6.8-9.8]) (stratified hazard ratio = 1.04 [0.86-1.26], p = 0.68). No significant heterogeneity was found in primary tumour locations, performance status groups, sex, age groups, and inclusion periods., Interpretation: Our findings suggested that receiving EPC did not improve the benefit of oncological care with regard to overall survival in patients with metastatic upper gastrointestinal cancer., Funding: Programme Hospitalier de Recherche Clinique, Ligue Contre le Cancer, Conseil Régional du Nord-Pas-de-Calais., Competing Interests: Antoine Adenis: Grants or contracts from ARCUS, AstraZeneca, Bayer Pharma, BEIGENE, BMS, Roche; Payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing or educational events from BMS and Novartis. Support for attending meetings and/or travel from AstraZeneca, Bayer Pharma, BMS, MSD, Pierre Fabre, Servier. Participation on a Data Safety Monitoring Board or Advisory Board from Astellas, Bayer Pharma, BMS, MSD. Meher Ben Abdelghani: Support for attending meetings and/or travel from Servier, Merck, Amgen, Roche. Participation on a Data Safety Monitoring Board or Advisory Board from Incyte, Deciphera, Bayer, Pierre Fabre, Servier, BMS. Vincent Bourgeois: Grants or contracts from Servier. Support for attending meetings and/or travel from Ipsen, Astra Zeneca, Sanofi. Participation on a Data Safety Monitoring Board or Advisory Board from AstraZeneca, Pierre Fabre, Servier. Anthony Turpin: Payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing or educational events from Servier, BMS, MSD, Viatris, AstraZeneca, Daiichi. Marie-Pierre Galais: Payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing or educational events from Servier, BMS. Support for attending meetings and/or travel from Servier, Bayer, AAA, Merck. Emmanuelle Samalin: Grants or contracts from Merck, Bayer, Servier. Payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing or educational events from Pierre Fabre Oncology; MSD, Amgen, BMS. Support for attending meetings and/or travel from Pierre Fabre Oncology; Servier, MSD. Participation on a Data Safety Monitoring Board or Advisory Board from Astellas, Servier, MSD. Sahir Javed: Payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing or educational events from AstraZeneca. Support for attending meetings and/or travel from Lilly, Pfizer. Delphine Cornuault-Foubert: Payment or honoraria for lectures, presentations, speakers bureaus, manuscript writing or educational events from BMS. Support for attending meetings and/or travel from Vifor, Amgen, Leopharma, Mundipharma. Christine Belletier: Support for attending meetings and/or travel from Mundipharma, Servier and Viatris. Nicolas Penel: Grants or contracts from Bayer., (© 2024 The Authors.)

When performing a joint action task, we automatically represent the action and/or task constraints of the co-actor with whom we are interacting. Current models suggest that, not only physical similarity, but also abstract, conceptual features shared between self and the interacting partner play a key role in the emergence of joint action effects. Across two experiments, we investigated the influence of the perceived humanness of a robotic agent on the extent to which we integrate the action of that agent into our own action/task representation, as indexed by the Joint Simon Effect (JSE). The presence (vs. absence) of a prior verbal interaction was used to manipulate robot's perceived humanness. In Experiment 1, using a within-participant design, we had participants perform the joint Go/No-go Simon task with two different robots. Before performing the joint task, one robot engaged in a verbal interaction with the participant and the other robot did not. In Experiment 2, we employed a between-participants design to contrast these two robot conditions as well as a human partner condition. In both experiments, a significant Simon effect emerged during joint action and its amplitude was not modulated by the humanness of the interacting partner. Experiment 2 further showed that the JSE obtained in robot conditions did not differ from that measured in the human partner condition. These findings contradict current theories of joint action mechanisms according to which perceived self-other similarity is a crucial determinant of self-other integration in shared task settings., Competing Interests: Declaration of conflicting interestsThe author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

In this French longitudinal study, we assessed judgment of the passage of time in current life and the predictors of this judgment 2 years after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, i.e., at a time when there was no lockdown and no protective measures. We then compared these measures with the same participants' passage-of-time judgments assessed during each of the past three French lockdowns. We also assessed their memory representations of the passage of time in the past, i.e., for the various lockdowns. The results showed the persistence of the feeling of time slowing down outside of lockdown. However, this was no longer linked to external factors (lack of activity, disruption of everyday routines) as found in the previous studies conducted during the lockdowns, but to an individual internal factor, namely a high level of depression in the general population. Moreover, the results revealed that the experience of the passage of time for the past lockdowns was compressed in memory, being judged to be faster than it actually was. This time compression tended to be greater in depressed people. It was also associated with a positive bias for all the other examined factors (e.g., sleep quality, life routine, boredom, happiness). We assumed that this time compression would be related to processes involved in the recall of unfolding events, with certain moments being omitted or forgotten during recall, as well as to the process of reconstruction in autobiographical memory. Our study therefore shows the long-lasting effect of lockdowns on mental health of the general population, which was expressed by the persistent feeling of a slowing down of time. It is therefore necessary to take care of this psychologically fragile population and to avoid further lockdowns in response to a new health crisis, that they cannot cope with., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2023 Droit-Volet et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

How working memory supports dual-task performance is the focus of a long-standing debate. Most previous research on this topic has focused on participant performance data. In three experiments, we investigated whether changes in participant-reported strategies across single- and dual-task conditions might help resolve this debate by offering new insights that lead to fruitful integration of theories rather than perpetuating debate by attempting to identify which theory best fits the data. Results indicated that articulatory suppression was associated with reduced reports of the use of rehearsal and clustering strategies but to an increase of the reported use of a visual strategy. Elaboration and clustering strategies were reported less for memory under dual task compared with single task. Under both dual task and articulatory suppression, more participants reported attempting to remember fewer memory items than were presented (memory reduction strategy). For arithmetic verification, articulatory suppression and dual task resulted in a reduction in reports of a counting strategy and an increase in reports of a retrieval strategy for arithmetic knowledge. It is argued that experimenters should not assume that participants perform the same task in the same way under different experimental conditions and that carefulty investigation of how participants change their strategies in response to changes in experimental conditions has considerable potential for resolving theoretical challenges. It is argued further that this approach points toward the value of attempting to integrate rather than proliferate theories of working memory. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The inattentional blindness phenomenon refers to situations in which a visible but unexpected stimulus remains consciously unnoticed by observers. This phenomenon is classically explained as the consequence of insufficient attention, because attentional resources are already engaged elsewhere or vary between individuals. However, this attentional-resources view is broad and often imprecise regarding the variety of attentional models, the different pools of resources that can be involved in attentional tasks, and the heterogeneity of the experimental paradigms. Our aim was to investigate whether a classic theoretical model of attention, namely the Load Theory, could account for a large range of empirical findings in this field by distinguishing the role of perceptual and cognitive resources in attentional selection and attentional capture by irrelevant stimuli. As this model has been mostly built on implicit measures of distractor interference, it is unclear whether its predictions also hold when explicit and subjective awareness of an unexpected stimulus is concerned. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review and meta-analyses of inattentional blindness studies investigating the role of perceptual and/or cognitive resources. The results reveal that, in line with the perceptual account of the Load Theory, inattentional blindness significantly increases with the perceptual load of the task. However, the cognitive account of this theory is not clearly supported by the empirical findings analysed here. Furthermore, the interaction between perceptual and cognitive load on inattentional blindness remains understudied. Theoretical implications for the Load Theory are discussed, notably regarding the difference between attentional capture and subjective awareness paradigms, and further research directions are provided.