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We describe a large-scale regression study that examines the influence of lexical (word frequency, lexical neighborhood) and sublexical (feedforward and feedback consistency) variables on spelling accuracy among first, second, and third- to fifth-graders. The wordset analyzed contained 3430 French words. Predictors in the stepwise regression analyses were grade-level-based and compiled from child-directed written materials. In all grades, feedforward consistency and word frequency had independent effects. However, whereas the feedforward-consistency contribution remained high and did not vary across grades, the impact of word frequency exhibited a massive jump between first and second grade. Interaction analyses showed that the feedforward-consistency effect was significantly lower for monosyllabic words than for polysyllabic ones, and significantly higher for low-frequency words. The effect of feedback consistency was difficult to clarify. Finally, the feedforward-consistency effects obtained at two different grain sizes suggest that children use more contextual information to spell words as orthographic knowledge develops. The findings are discussed in relation to models of spelling and to the developmental aspects of learning to spell.

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Digital plays a key role in the transformation of medicine. Beyond the simple computerisation of healthcare systems, many non-drug treatments are now possible thanks to digital technology. Thus, interactive stimulation exercises can be offered to people suffering from cognitive disorders, such as developmental disorders, neurodegenerative diseases, stroke or traumas. The efficiency of these new treatments, which are still primarily offered face-to-face by therapists, can be greatly improved if patients can pursue them at home. However, patients are left to their own devices which can be problematic. We introduce THERADIA, a 5-year project that aims to develop an empathic virtual agent that accompanies patients while receiving digital therapies at home, and that provides feedback to therapists and caregivers. We detail the architecture of our agent as well as the framework of our Wizard-of-Oz protocol, designed to collect a large corpus of interactions between people and our virtual assistant in order to train our models and improve our dialogues.

The issue of climate change has become central in recent years as alarming data accumulate. It nevertheless has its critics, consisting of people denying climate change or minimizing the responsibility of human beings in the process. This skepticism partly derives from the complexity of the topic, encouraging people to rely on cognitive shortcuts to grasp the phenomenon. We question the role of analytic cognitive style, general and climate change-related knowledge, overconfidence, and political partisanship (plus additional expected confounding variables) in this process through a package of three studies (total N = 1031). In a first study, we showed that an intuitive mindset predicted greater skepticism relative to an analytical mindset while controlling for cognitive ability and the degree to which individuals value science, suggesting that reasoning cognitive style and trust are key parameters of climate change skepticism. A second study highlighted that climate science knowledge stands as strong and independent predictors of skepticism relative to analytic cognitive style. A final study revealed that analytic cognitive style and climate change knowledge generated less influence on climate change skepticism among conservatives than among liberals and moderates, suggesting that reliance on deliberative thinking and knowledgeability on climate science are not sufficient to mitigate climate change skepticism among conservatives. We discuss the critical interplay between cognitive processes and political partisanship in this ongoing debate.

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Most cognitive models of apraxia assume that impaired tool use results from a deficit occurring at the conceptual level, which contains dedicated information about tool use, namely, semantic and action tool knowledge. Semantic tool knowledge contains information about the prototypical use of familiar tools, such as function (e.g., a hammer and a mallet share the same purpose) and associative relations (e.g., a hammer goes with a nail). Action tool knowledge contains information about how to manipulate tools, such as hand posture and kinematics. The present review aimed to better understand the neural correlates of action and semantic tool knowledge, by focusing on activation, stimulation and patients' studies (left brain-damaged patients). We found that action and semantic tool knowledge rely upon a large brain network including temporal and parietal regions. Yet, while action tool knowledge calls into play the intraparietal sulcus, function relations mostly involve the anterior and posterior temporal lobe. Associative relations engaged the angular and the posterior middle temporal gyrus. Moreover, we found that hand posture and kinematics both tapped into the inferior parietal lobe and the lateral occipital temporal cortex, but no region specificity was found for one or the other representation. Our results point out the major role of both posterior middle temporal gyrus and inferior parietal lobe for action and semantic tool knowledge. They highlight the common and distinct brain networks involved in action and semantic tool networks and spur future directions on this topic.

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Theoretical views suggest that tool use and numerical magnitude processing can interact during prospective actions. For example, if a person intends to make a meal for several persons the next week, she/he will have to keep in mind during the homework-week large dish and large food portions for this event. Here, the magnitude 'large' can influence the future choice for large dishes and other related large tools. This study presents the first empirical evidence supporting this hypothesis. During a prospective memory task that implied to keep in mind a future action, participants were required to use a tool after processing Arabic numbers. Small (less than 5) and large (more than 5) magnitudes were employed as cues for the initiation of the tool-use task, which required participants to use inverse pliers with a small or a large object, but only for some prospective trials. The inverse pliers were used to dissociate the hand action from the tool action with the object (for example, opening the hand produced the closing action of the tool). The results revealed that during prospective trials, number processing interacted only with the tool action toward the object and not with the hand action. Specifically, after the processing of large magnitudes, the initiation of the closing action of the tool (i.e. the opening action of the hand) was reduced. This finding is discussed in the light of theories on the emergence of semantics through tool actions.

INTRODUCTION Pain is underdiagnosed and undertreated in patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD). Pain management is of major importance in this population to limit behavioural and functional consequences. Our study aimed to assess the capacity of AD patients to represent pain using a questionnaire exploring daily painful situations and to determine the most appropriate pain scale assessment. METHODS Twenty-eight patients with mild AD, 21 with moderate AD and 28 matched controls underwent the Situation Pain Questionnaire (SP-Q) and assessed imaginary pain with four pain scales. Two scores were compared between the three groups: the P(A) discrimination score and the response bias β score. P(A) reflects the degree of discrimination between high-pain and low-pain events, whereas the β score means the degree to which situations are considered as painful. RESULTS Our results showed that AD patients hardly discriminated the high- from low-pain events. Compared to controls, the mean P(A) score was significantly lower for Mild AD (p

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Introduction: Although there are plenty of studies on affective or cognitive theory of mind (ToM) in Alzheimer’s Disease (AD), few have investigated both these dimensions and even fewer have examin...

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Working memory (WM) is the keystone of general cognitive achievement, but it declines with aging. The present study aims to investigate the consequence of WM deficits on the stability of WM traces over time. It has recently been proposed that long-term retention in younger adults is, at least in part, dependent on the total time during which each trace is under the control of attention in WM (Jarjat et al., 2018). In a complex span task, two factors aiming at varying the amount of attention available for maintaining WM traces were orthogonally manipulated: the cognitive load (CL) of the processing task and the number of distractors. A group of older participants performed this task and were tested for immediate and delayed recall. When compared to previous findings in young adults, older adults elicited lower immediate performance than younger adults, but only for a memory score that included stabilized traces. For delayed memory, younger adults outperformed older adults, but a similar pattern of results was observed in both groups. First, the two factors affected long-term memory performance to the same extent in young and older adults. Second, a non-linear relationship between delayed recall performance and the time accumulated for attentional maintenance between encoding and immediate recall was observed. This particular relationship did not differ from the one observed in young adults. These findings suggest that the core mechanisms underlying the long-term stability of WM traces still work in aging.

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We report the case of a patient who had an important experience with painful events, allowing the investigation of brain concomitants to painful (P) memories in fMRI. The patient had to recall P events that were contrasted with non-painful (NP) memories. Painful memories of the right lower limb activated the left paracentral lobule,fronto-insular operculum and superior parietal cortex. Additionally, whilst the recall of non-painful events activated the hippocampus, the recall of painful events did not enhance the hippocampal signal to significant levels. These suggest that brain activations differ for the autobiographical recall of painful and non-painful memories.

In the last decade, research has shown that word processing is influenced by the lexical and semantic features of words. However, norms for a crucial semantic variable—that is, conceptual familiarity—have not been available for a sizeable French database. We thus developed French Canadian conceptual familiarity norms for 3,596 nouns. This enriches Desrochers and Thompson’s (2009) database, in which subjective frequency and imageability values are already available for the same words. We collected online data from 313 Canadian French speakers. The full database of conceptual familiarity ratings is freely available at http://lingualab.ca/fr/projets/normes-de-familiarite-conceptuelle . We then demonstrated the utility of these new conceptual familiarity norms by assessing their contribution to lexical decision times. We conducted a stepwise regression model with conceptual familiarity in the last step. This allowed us to assess the independent contribution of conceptual familiarity beyond the contributions of other well-known psycholinguistic variables, such as frequency, imageability, and age of acquisition. The results showed that conceptual familiarity facilitated lexical decision latencies. In sum, these ratings will help researchers select French stimuli for experiments in which conceptual familiarity must be taken into account.

In the last decade, research has shown that word processing is influenced by the lexical and semantic features of words. However, norms for a crucial semantic variable-that is, conceptual familiarity-have not been available for a sizeable French database. We thus developed French Canadian conceptual familiarity norms for 3,596 nouns. This enriches Desrochers and Thompson's (2009) database, in which subjective frequency and imageability values are already available for the same words. We collected online data from 313 Canadian French speakers. The full database of conceptual familiarity ratings is freely available at http://lingualab.ca/fr/projets/normes-de-familiarite-conceptuelle . We then demonstrated the utility of these new conceptual familiarity norms by assessing their contribution to lexical decision times. We conducted a stepwise regression model with conceptual familiarity in the last step. This allowed us to assess the independent contribution of conceptual familiarity beyond the contributions of other well-known psycholinguistic variables, such as frequency, imageability, and age of acquisition. The results showed that conceptual familiarity facilitated lexical decision latencies. In sum, these ratings will help researchers select French stimuli for experiments in which conceptual familiarity must be taken into account.

Congenital amusia is a lifelong deficit of music processing, in particular of pitch processing. Most research investigating this neurodevelopmental disorder has focused on music perception, but pitch also has a critical role for intentional and emotional prosody in speech. Two previous studies investigating amusics’ emotional prosody recognition have shown either some deficit or no deficit (compared to controls). However, these previous studies have used only long sentence stimuli, which allow for limited control over acoustic content. Here, we tested amusic individuals for emotional prosody perception in sentences and vowels. For each type of material, participants performed an emotion categorization task, followed by intensity ratings of the recognized emotion. Compared to controls, amusic individuals had similar recognition of emotion in sentences, but poorer performance in vowels, especially when distinguishing sad and neutral stimuli. These lower performances in amusics were linked with difficulties in processing pitch and spectro-temporal parameters of the vowel stimuli. For emotion intensity, neither sentence nor vowel ratings differed between participant groups, suggesting preserved implicit processing of emotional prosody in amusia. These findings can be integrated into previous data showing preserved implicit processing of pitch and emotion in amusia alongside deficits in explicit recognition tasks. They are thus further supporting the hypothesis of impaired conscious analysis of pitch and timbre in this neurodevelopmental disorder.HighlightsAmusics showed preserved emotional prosody recognition in sentencesAmusics showed a deficit for emotional prosody recognition in short voice samplesPreserved intensity ratings of emotions in amusia suggest spared implicit processes

Previous research has shown that emotional stimuli may interfere with working memory (WM) processes, but little is known about the process affected. Using a complex span task, the present study investigated the influence of processing negative emotional content on attentional maintenance in WM. In two experiments conducted under articulatory suppression, participants were asked to remember a series of five letters, each of which was followed by an image to be categorised. In half of the trials, the images were negative and in the other half, they were neutral. In both experiments, our results showed longer processing times for emotional stimuli than neutral stimuli, and lower memory performance when participants processed negative stimuli. We propose that emotional stimuli direct more attentional resources towards the processing component of the WM task, thereby reducing the storage capacity available for the items that are to be remembered.

During the past decades, animal and human physiological studies have suggested that subcortical structures that are part of the extrageniculate pathways have an important role to play in the attentive selection of targets and the filtering of distractors. However, not much has been done to investigate the filtering of distractors in purely behavioural experiments through cues that might reveal extrageniculate functions, such as the asymmetry in performance between the nasal and the temporal visual fields. Here, under monocular conditions, participants viewed laterally and tachistoscopically presented sets of visual stimuli and were required to decide whether a target was present in the set or not. The manipulation of attention demands was achieved by varying the degree of spatial organization of the stimuli. A temporal field advantage in detection accuracy was found, and was observed only for disorganised sets of stimuli, that is, when demands on attention were greater. Furthermore, this pattern was found only for stimuli projected to the right hemisphere. The results suggest that the extrageniculate pathways of the right hemisphere in humans are involved in filtering out distractors. They are discussed in light of findings and theories about extrageniculate mediation of selective attention.

International audience; Numerous studies have explored the effect of sleep on memory. It is well known that a period of sleep, compared to a similar period of wakefulness, protects memories from interference, improves performance, and might also reorganize memory traces in a way that encourages creativity and rule extraction. It is assumed that these benefits come from the reactivation of brain networks, mainly involving the hippocampal structure, as well as from their synchronization with neocortical networks during sleep, thereby underpinning sleep-dependent memory consolidation and reorganization. However, this memory reorganization is difficult to explain within classical memory models. The present paper aims to describe whether the influence of sleep on memory could be explained using a multiple trace memory model that is consistent with the concept of embodied cognition: the Act–In (activation–integration) memory model. We propose an original approach to the results observed in sleep research on the basis of two simple mechanisms, namely activation and integration.

Music cognition research has provided evidence for the benefit of temporally regular structures guiding attention over time. The present study investigated whether maintenance in working memory can benefit from an isochronous rhythm. Participants were asked to remember series of 6 letters for serial recall. In the rhythm condition of Experiment 1A, a wood block sound was presented 6 times with a regular stimulus-onset-asynchrony during the delay between encoding and recall. In the silent condition, no sound was presented. The presence of the regular rhythm resulted in improved memory performance (Experiment 1A.), an effect also observed under articulatory suppression (Experiment 2), suggesting that temporal regularities can enhance maintenance in working memory including attentional refreshing. Experiment 1B confirmed this interpretation by showing that the presentation of a nonisochronous rhythm did not result in improved memory performance in comparison to a silent condition. The findings are discussed in relation to current working memory models and the theoretical framework of dynamic attending. (PsycINFO Database Record

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Typically, positive and negative emotional items are easier to remember than neutral ones. Charles, Mather, and Carstensen (2003) reported that older adults preferentially remember positive items, but this age-related "positivity effect" has not been replicated consistently.We conducted a close replication of Charles et al.'s study to verify that their method yields a clear positivity effect in older adults relative to the young. We also examined the role of attention, which has been argued to influence the presence of the positivity effect in older adults. We used a method similar to Charles et al. (2003). Young and older adults recalled pictures that had been encoded under full or divided attention.Older adults showed a positivity effect, but only under full attention. Young adults did not show any hint of a positivity effect, under either of the encoding conditions. The finding of a positivity effect in older but not young adults replicates the original report from Charles et al. (2003). The attention manipulation results suggest that when the positivity effect occurs in older adults' memory, it is attributable at least in part to cognitive control during encoding. Key terms: Emotional Enhancement of Memory-Divided attention-Aging.

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Ce travail vise à préciser les difficultés en compréhension de lecture d’enfants porteurs de troubles du spectre autistique sans déficience intellectuelle (TSA sans DI). Dix enfants TSA sans DI ont été évalués en identification de mots écrits et en compréhension orale et écrite (littérale, inférentielle de cohésion et basée sur les connaissances) à l’aide d’épreuves informatisées. Une dissociation était attendue entre des capacités préservées en identification de mots écrit et déficitaires en compréhension particulièrement en traitement inférentiel. La grande hétérogénéité des résultats ne permet pas de retrouver cette dissociation. Toutefois, tous les enfants présentaient des difficultés dans au moins un des processus de l’habileté en lecture. Malgré le caractère restreint de l’effectif qui limite la généralisation des résultats, cette étude souligne la nécessité d’évaluer précisément l’habileté en lecture chez les enfants TSA sans DI afin de comprendre leurs difficultés et pouvoir ainsi leur proposer une remédiation adaptée., The aim of this study is to precise the reading comprehension deficit of high functioning children with autism spectrum disorders (HFASD). Ten children with HFASD have been tested in decoding, listening and silent reading comprehension tasks (literal, text-connecting and knowledge-based inferences) using a computerized assessment. A dissociation was expected with preserved decoding skills and low comprehension processes especially for inferential processing. The large heterogeneity in children with HFASD performances did not permit to find this dissociation, however, they all present difficulties in at least one of the reading processing. Despite the lack of generalizability of results due to the restricted sample, this study emphasizes the need to evaluate precisely reading skills in children with HFASD in order to understand their difficulties and be able to offer them appropriate remediation.

Objectives: Recent evidence indicates that some left brain-damaged (LBD) patients have difficulties to use familiar tools because of the inability to reason about physical object properties. A fundamental issue is to understand the residual capacity of those LBD patients in tool selection. Methods: Three LBD patients with tool use disorders, three right brain-damaged (RBD) patients, and six matched healthy controls performed a novel tool selection task, consisting in extracting a target out from a box by selecting the relevant tool among eight, four, or two tools. Three criteria were manipulated to make relevant and irrelevant tools (size, rigidity, shape). Results: LBD patients selected a greater number of irrelevant tools and had more difficulties to solve the task compared to RBD patients and controls. All participants committed more errors for selecting relevant tools based on rigidity and shape than size. In some LBD patients, the difficulties persisted even in the 2-Choice condition. Conclusions: Our findings confirm that tool use disorders result from impaired technical reasoning, leading patients to meet difficulties in selecting tools based on their physical properties. We also go further by showing that these difficulties can decrease as the choice is reduced, at least for some properties, opening new avenues for rehabilitation programs. (JINS, 2018, 24, 524–529)

In the literature on apraxia of tool use, it is now accepted that using familiar tools requires semantic and mechanical knowledge. However, mechanical knowledge is nearly always assessed with production tasks, so one may assume that mechanical knowledge and familiar tool use are associated only because of their common motor mechanisms. This notion may be challenged by demonstrating that familiar tool use depends on an alternative tool selection task assessing mechanical knowledge, where alternative uses of tools are assumed according to their physical properties but where actual use of tools is not needed. We tested 21 left brain-damaged patients and 21 matched controls with familiar tool use tasks (pantomime and single tool use), semantic tasks and an alternative tool selection task. The alternative tool selection task accounted for a large amount of variance in the single tool use task and was the best predictor among all the semantic tasks. Concerning the pantomime of tool use task, group and individual results suggested that the integrity of the semantic system and preserved mechanical knowledge are neither necessary nor sufficient to produce pantomimes. These results corroborate the idea that mechanical knowledge is essential when we use tools, even when tasks assessing mechanical knowledge do not require the production of any motor action. Our results also confirm the value of pantomime of tool use, which can be considered as a complex activity involving several cognitive abilities (e.g., communicative skills) rather than the activation of gesture engrams.

According to grounded theories of cognition, knowledge is grounded in its sensory-motor features. Therefore, perceptual and conceptual processing should be based on the same distributed system so that conceptual and perceptual processes should interact. The present study assesses whether gustatory stimulation (participants tasted a sweet or a nonsweet yoghurt) could influence performance on a categorization task that involves the reactivation of the same sensory dimension. The results indicate that participants were slower (Experiment 1) or faster (Experiment 2), respectively, at categorizing pictures as representing edible sweet stimuli when they either simultaneously or had previously tasted a sweet yoghurt as compared to a nonsweet yoghurt. These results confirm the significant overlap between perceptual and memory mechanisms and suggest the functional equivalence between perceptually present and perceptually absent (memory reactivated) dimensions.

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International audience; Embodiment has highlighted the importance of sensory-motor components in cognition. Perception and memory are thus very tightly bound together, and episodic and semantic memories should rely on the same grounded memory traces. Reduced perception should then directly reduce the ability to encode and retrieve an episodic memory, as in normal aging. Multimodal integration deficits, as in Alzheimer's disease, should lead to more severe episodic memory impairment. The present study introduces a new memory test developed to take into account these assumptions. The SEMEP (SEMantic-Episodic) memory test proposes to assess conjointly semantic and episodic knowledge across multiple tasks: semantic matching, naming, free recall, and recognition. The performance of young adults is compared to healthy elderly adults (HE), patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD), and patients with semantic dementia (SD). The results show specific patterns of performance between the groups. HE commit memory errors only for presented but not to be remembered items. AD patients present the worst episodic memory performance associated with intrusion errors (recall or recognition of items never presented). They were the only group to not benefit from a visual isolation (addition of a yellow background), a method known to increase the distinctiveness of the memory traces. Finally, SD patients suffer from the most severe semantic impairment. To conclude, confusion errors are common across all the elderly groups, whereas AD was the only group to exhibit regular intrusion errors and SD patients to show severe semantic impairment.

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How do we represent the meaning of words? The present study assesses whether access to conceptual knowledge requires the reenactment of the sensory components of a concept. The reenactment-that is, simulation-was tested in a word categorisation task using an innovative masking paradigm. We hypothesised that a meaningless reactivated visual mask should interfere with the simulation of the visual dimension of concrete words. This assumption was tested in a paradigm in which participants were not aware of the link between the visual mask and the words to be processed. In the first phase, participants created a tone-visual mask or tone-control stimulus association. In the test phase, they categorised words that were presented with 1 of the tones. Results showed that words were processed more slowly when they were presented with the reactivated mask. This interference effect was only correlated with and explained by the value of the visual perceptual strength of the words (i.e., our experience with the visual dimensions associated with concepts) and not with other characteristics. We interpret these findings in terms of word access, which may involve the simulation of sensory features associated with the concept, even if participants were not explicitly required to access visual properties. (PsycINFO Database Record

Most studies of human-tool interactions focus on the typical use of a tool (e.g., cutting in the case of a knife). However, little is known about situations requiring atypical tool use (e.g., using a knife to tighten a screw). The present study focused on a selection of atypical uses of everyday tools which might be in conflict with their typical use. Our objective was to study how tool function influences the selection of the relevant action. In Experiment 1, which involved visuomotor priming, two everyday tools (a knife and a screwdriver) and two neutral tools (two bars, with no strong functional affordance) were used as primes and targets. Participants had to use the target with the appropriate box (indicated by the color) that allowed to make an action. Longer initiation times were observed when the prime was an everyday tool, irrespective of the nature of the target. We therefore observed a conflict between functional and situational affordances. To investigate whether the priming effect is caused by the task-irrelevance of the prime, we asked the participants in Experiment 2 to perform an action associated with the prime. The results showed longer initiation times only when the prime and target were everyday tools, irrespective of their precise nature. This suggests that activation of the typical use of a tool might not be fully automatic but flexible depending on the situation.

The present article proposes a new memory model called Act-In (Activation-Integration). Act-In extends the multiple trace memory models by placing them within the situated cognition perspective. Act-In considers that the activation and integration mechanisms play a key role in memory processes. These mechanisms are involved in both the construction of memory traces and the emergence of knowledge. The model is based on four main assumptions: (1) Memory traces reflect all the components of past experiences and, in particular, their sensory properties, actions performed on the objects in the environment and the emotional states of individuals. Memory traces are therefore distributed across multiple neuronal systems which code the multiple components of the experiences. (2) Knowledge is emergent and is the product of the coupling of the present experience with past experiences. (3) The brain is a categorisation system which develops by accumulating experiences and which, by default, produces categorical knowl...

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We compared action (pour or twist?) and contextual/semantic (found in kitchen?) decisions made to pictures of objects, nonobjects, and words. Although there was no advantage for objects over words in contextual/semantic decisions, there was an advantage for objects over words and nonobjects in action decisions. For objects, both action and contextual/semantic decisions were faster than naming; for words, the opposite occurred. These results extend the early results of Potter and Faulconer (1975) that there is privileged access to semantic memory for objects relative to that for words and privileged access to phonology for words. Our data suggest that, for objects, there is privileged access to action knowledge rather than to all forms of semantic knowledge and that this is contingent on learned associations between objects and actions.

IF=3.03; International audience; Somatic sensations may arise in the total absence of external stimuli, i.e., spontaneous sensations (SPSs). Because the background of body sensations has been mentioned as a possible contributor to interoceptive functions, such as the perception of the self and the conscious awareness of one's own body, a possible link between SPSs and interoception has been advocated. Yet, no study has provided direct evidence on such a relationship. The aim of the present study was to establish a link between SPSs and interoception. On the basis of the literature, the accuracy of heartbeat perception was taken as an index of general interoception across different bodily modalities. It was found that individuals with good heartbeat perception experienced more numerous and more intense SPSs. Furthermore, taken along with other individual characteristics, heartbeat perception accuracy predicted the perceived intensity of SPSs, their spatial extent, their variety, as well as confidence in their spatial characteristics. However, we also provide evidence that good vs. poor heartbeat perception is not just a matter of degree. We conclude that interoception definitely contributes to the perception of SPSs

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