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We investigated the moderating impact of the personality construct alexithymia on the ability of younger and older adults to control the recall of negative and neutral material. We conducted two experiments using the directed forgetting paradigm with younger and older adults. Participants studied negative (Experiment 1) or neutral (Experiment 2) words. Participants were instructed to forget the first half and remember the second half of an entire list of words. Overall, we found that alexithymia impairs the ability of both younger and older adults to cognitively control negative material (through both recall and inhibition). The “externally oriented thinking” factor of alexithymia appears to play a particularly pertinent role in terms of inhibiting negative material. Furthermore, older adults recalled fewer sought after negative items, but this was not evident in terms of inhibition. In contrast, only age (older adults) negatively impacted the recall of sought after neutral items. Interestingly, alexithymia had the opposite effect: the “difficulty in identifying emotions” factor of alexithymia was associated with an increased recall of neutral items. We discuss these results in terms of alexithymia and its impact on cognitive control. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Spatial attention can be captured automatically by an exogenous stimulus (e.g., digital interruption) or by an endogenous stimulus (e.g., valence of the stimulus). In this study, we investigated whether a non-perceptual characteristic (e.g., sense of fluency) has an impact on attention. To this end, we used the conceptual fluency paradigm developed by Whittlesea combined with the dot-probe task developed by MacLeod et al. In three experiments, we measured the response times for each experimental situation (i.e., Valid and Non-valid situations). At each trial, participants were presented in three consecutive displays on a screen: (1) an incomplete and predictive sentence stem; (2) a pair of words, one of which was semantically compatible with the previous sentence stem; and (3) a circle appeared at the spatial location of one of the words. Then, participants had to perform a Go (i.e., a filled circle) and No-go (i.e., an empty circle) task. The analysis found that response times were significantly faster when the Go stimulus appeared at the same location as the semantically compatible word (i.e., Valid situations). Overall, our results show that the sense of fluency triggers attentional capture. Thus, they replicate those of Gardner et al. using another experimental paradigm. Our finding might be helpful to better understand the consequences of digital interruptions on behavioural performance.

The aim of this work was to test the hypothesis that motor fluency should help the integration of the components of the trace and therefore its re-construction. In the encoding phase of each of the three experiments we conducted, a word to be remembered appeared colored in blue or purple. Participants had to read these words aloud and, at the same time, execute a gesture in their ipsilateral (fluent gesture) or contralateral space (non-fluent gesture), according to the color of the word. The aim of the first experiment was to show that the words associated with a fluent gesture during the encoding phase were more easily recognized than those associated with a non-fluent gesture. The results obtained supported the hypothesis. In the second experiment, our objective was to show that the fluency of a gesture performed during encoding in order to associate a word with a color can facilitate the integration of the word with its color. Here again, the results obtained supported the hypothesis. While in Experiment 2 we tested the effect of motor fluency during encoding on word-color integration, the objective of Experiment 3 was to show that motor fluency was integrated in the word-color trace and contributed to the re-construction of the trace. The results obtained supported the hypothesis. Taken together, these findings lead us to believe that traces are not only traces of the processes that gave rise to them, but also traces of the way in which the processes took place., (© 2022. The Psychonomic Society, Inc.)

Merely seeing large objects (e.g., apples) potentiates power grip whereas seeing small objects (e.g., strawberries) potentiates precision grip. According to the embodied cognition account, this potentiation effect reflects automatic access to object representation, including the grip usually associated with the object. Alternatively, this effect might be due to an overlap between magnitude codes used to code manipulable objects and magnitude codes used to code responses outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants saw objects usually grasped with a power or precision grip and had to press keys either with their forefinger or with their palm, each response generating a low or high tone (i.e., a large vs. small perceptual outcome, respectively). Tones were automatically delivered by headphones after the responses have been made in line with the ideomotor theories according to which voluntary actions are carried out due to the anticipation of their outcomes. Consistent with the magnitude-coding hypothesis, response times were shorter when the object and the anticipated response outcome were of the same magnitude than when they were not. These results were also consistent with a between-experiment analysis. In Experiments 2 and 3, we investigated to what extent removing or switching the outcomes during the experiment influence the potentiation effect. Our results support that the potentiation effect of grasping behaviours could be due to the compatibility between magnitude codes rather than to the involvement of motor representations. Our results also suggest a spontaneous use of the magnitude of response outcomes to code responses, as well as the flexibility of this coding processes when responses outcomes are altered., (© 2021. The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer-Verlag GmbH Germany, part of Springer Nature.)

Introduction: Individuals with brain injuries experience cognitive and emotional changes that have long-lasting impacts on everyday life. In the context of rehabilitation, surveys have stressed the importance of compensating for memory disturbances to ease the impact of disorders on day-to-day autonomy. Despite extensive research on the nature of neurocognitive impairments following brain injury, few studies have looked at patients' perceptions of these day-to-day compensations. This study examines these perceptions; in particular, what brain-injured people believe they do to compensate for memory deficiencies in everyday life. It also investigates the determinants of reported compensation strategies (age, gender, perceived stress, change awareness and motivation to succeed)., Methods: Eighty patients and 80 controls completed the French Memory Compensation Questionnaire, a self-report measure of everyday memory compensation. Five forms of compensation were investigated: External and Internal strategies, Reliance on social help, and investments in Time and Effort, along with two general factors: the degree of importance attached to Success (motivation) and perceptions of Change. Participants also completed measures of demographic and emotional aspects that may affect everyday compensation perceptions., Results: The brain-injured group reported significantly more frequent use of memory compensation strategies than controls, with the exception of External aids. Large effects were observed for Reliance and Effort. Demographic, motivation and perception of change determinants were found to have different effects depending on the compensation strategy, and mediated the direct effect of brain injury on reported compensation., Conclusion: Clinical and rehabilitation neuropsychologists often seek to have a better sense of how their patients perceive their compensatory behaviors. In practice, such an understanding is needed to help select appropriate methods and improve the long-term impact of rehabilitation programs: memory rehabilitation will fail if neuropsychologists do not deal, first and foremost, with the emotional and metacognitive issues surrounding traumatic brain injury (TBI), rather than focusing on cognitive efficiency., Competing Interests: The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2021 Martin, Mooruth, Guerdoux-Ninot, Mazzocco, Brouillet, Taconnat and Trouillet.)

This work is rooted in the embodied cognition paradigm applied to the evaluation of visuospatial memory span. We aimed to test whether manuospatial incompatibility affects the evaluation of visuospatial working memory. Older and younger participants were tested under two different spatial field conditions, namely manuospatial incompatibility and manuospatial compatibility, using the standard Corsi Block Tapping Task. The results show that a manuospatial compatibility condition helped both younger and older participants to increase their visuospatial working memory span compared to the traditional manuospatial incompatibility condition. By analyzing the data, our results showed an increase of visuospatial memory span in manuospatial compatibility condition (i.e., the experimenter using his left hand and the participant his right hand) compared to manuospatial incompatibility condition for younger and older adults. We recommend that the interaction between body and cognition would be taken into account in clinical evaluation methods.

Classically investigated in the context of judgment tasks about achievable actions, affordances have also been investigated in the context of the stimulus-response compatibility paradigm. Earlier work showed that perceptual categorization performance is significantly faster and more accurate when the orientation of the graspable part of a presented object, and the orientation of the participant's response are compatible, suggesting that the main function of affordances is restricted to action preparation. Here, we investigate the potential role of affordances in the categorization of ambiguous stimuli through a stimulus-response compatibility paradigm. In other words, we investigate if in ambiguous situations, such as ones in which a stimulus may give rise to two percepts, affordances would stabilize perception on one of these two and, therefore, helps in the subsequent categorizations. Two experiments were run, based on the forced-choice stimulus-response compatibility (SRC) paradigm, with a progressive series of ambiguous (bistable) lateral-graspable objects. In Experiment 1, subjects responded by pressing horizontally opposite keyboard keys, while in Experiment 2, the keyboard keys were vertically separated. Experiment 1 found that subjects perceived the initial object in a bistable series for longer, and exhibited greater response stability in compatible than incompatible situations. In Experiment 2, none of these modulations were significant. Overall, our results show that affordances operationalized through a SRC paradigm modulated how subjects categorized ambiguous stimuli. We argue that affordances may play a substantial role in ambiguous contexts by reducing the uncertainty of such situations.

According to the embodied approach of language, concepts are grounded in sensorimotor mental states, and when we process language, the brain simulates some of the perceptions and actions that are involved when interacting with real objects. Moreover, several studies have highlighted that cognitive performances are dependent on the overlap between the motor action simulated and the motor action required by the task. On the other hand, in the field of memory, the role of action is under debate. The aim of this work was to show that performing an action at the stage of retrieval influences memory performance in a recognition task (experiment 1) and a cued recall task (experiment 2), even if the participants were never instructed to consider the implied action. The results highlighted an action-based memory effect at the retrieval stage. These findings contribute to the debate about the implication of motor system in action verb processing and its role for memory.

A previous study on ideomotor action control showed that predictable action effects in the agent's environment influenced how an action is carried out. If participants were required to perform a forceful keypress, they exerted more force when these actions would produce a quiet compared to a loud tone, and this observation suggests that anticipated proprioceptive and auditory action effects are integrated with each other during action planning and control. In light of the typically weak influence of body-related effect found in recent work, we aimed to extend this pattern of results to the intra-modal case of integrating proprioceptive/tactile feedback of a movement and following vibro-tactile effects. Our results suggest that the same weighted integration process as for the cross-modal case applies to the intra-modal case. These observations support the idea of a common mechanism which binds all action-related features in an integrated action representation, irrespective of whether these features relate to exafferent or reafferent signals.

Introduction : The Prospective and Retrospective Memory Questionnaire (PRMQ) is one of the most commonly used scales to assess both retrospective memory (RM) and prospective memory (PM) complaints. This study aimed to: 1/replicate the previous results concerning the PRMQ latent structure in a French version and 2/provide its psychometric properties in a normal and clinical population. Method : This observational study included 488 participants divided into five subgroups. A sample of 168 healthy participants (no memory consultation sought), served as controls. Patients were recruited in a memory clinic: 98 "functional" patients (subjective memory complaints but no memory impairment), 83 amnestic-Mild Cognitive Impairment (a-MCI), 82 non-amnestic-MCI (na-MCI) and 57 Alzheimer Disease (AD) patients. Structure, validity, consistency, reliabilitiy and reproducibility of the PRMQ were calculated. Novelty, Area Under the Receiver-Operating Characteristics (AUROC) curve, was used to determine the optimal cut-off, to distinguish "functional" patients from control participants. Results : The optimal fit model of the French PMRQ was not a tri but a bi-partite model, with a RM and a PM subscale. The convergent validity showed significant correlation with cognitive difficulties ( r = .82 and .78, respectively), anxiety ( r = .44 and .48, respectively) and depression ( r = .23) scales. Cronbach's alpha was good (α = .79 and .88), as well as the reproducibility ( r = .71 and .80). The interaction [Subgroups of participants x PMRQ Subscales] was significant [F(4, 483) = 11.46; p < .001]. The power discrimination was adequate (AUROC = .71 and .74) for detecting "functional" patients compared with controls, in particular for the PM subscale (sensitivity 66.6%, specificity 77.4%). Conclusions : The PMRQ, with minor changes, was validated in its French form with satisfactory psychometric qualities. This self-rating tool appears useful for identifying significant memory complaints in a normal population and may also be helpful in discriminating between functional/na-MCI and a-MCI/AD patients.

This work aimed to assess the role of manual laterality in action coding strategies and, subsequently, in environmental features relevant for each hand's action. Relying on Eder and Hommel's (2013) proposal, we distinguished stimulus-related and end state-related consequences in a Simon paradigm where right-handed participants were divided into two groups, one responding with gloves and one without. Two objects were presented pictorially: one for which sensory consequences of grasping were negatively valenced (a chestnut burr), and one for which they were positively valenced (an apricot). By these means, stimulus and end-state effects could be assessed separately, along with the relevance of each feature of the experimental settings. Results showed that the use of one's dominant or non dominant hand gives rise to different repercussions of stimulus-related and end state-related effects on response: Responses made with the right (dominant) hand were based on an elaborated coding (representing features of stimulus-related and end state-related consequences of action). In contrast, responses made with the left (non dominant) hand seemed to be based on a less elaborated coding (not taking into account end-state consequences of an action).

Several works have provided evidence of a resonant motor effect while observing a hand interacting with painful stimuli. The aim of this work is to show that participants are sensitive to the observation of an injured hand when they have to categorise an easily graspable object with their own hand. In Experiment 1, participants indicated whether or not photographs of objects (graspable or non-graspable, left or right oriented) could be grasped with their dominant hand, by tapping a key on a keyboard. Target objects were preceded by primes consisting of photographs of hands (injured vs healthy) in a grasping posture (power grasp). Experiment 2 consisted of two phases: In the first phase, participants had to categorise square or circle shapes. After their response (Group 1: tapping a key vs Group 2: constricting a hand grip), photograph of two types of hand (injured vs healthy) was displayed on the computer screen. In the second phase, participants had to indicate whether objects could be easily grasped with their dominant hand. Target objects were preceded by primes (square and circle) as shown in the first phase. Results show that response times were slower when the graspable target objects were right oriented and preceded by the photograph or a geometric shape associated with an injured hand. This response delay was accentuated in the handgrip condition. These results highlight that the view of an injured hand activates motor programme and pain mechanisms associated with participants relative to the consequences of the simulated grasping action.

This study investigated the role of action constraints related to an object as regards allocentric distance estimation in extrapersonal space. In two experiments conducted in both real and virtual environments, participants intending to push a trolley had to estimate its distance from a target situated in front of them. The trolley was either empty (i.e., light) or loaded with books (i.e., heavy). The results showed that the estimated distances were larger for the heavy trolley than for the light one, and that the actual distance between the participants and the trolley moderated this effect. This data suggests that the potential mobility of an object used as a reference affects distance estimation in extrapersonal space. According to embodied perception theories, our results show that people perceive space in terms of constraints related to their potential actions.

Aim: To disentangle the respective impacts of manual dexterity and cerebral palsy (CP) in cognitive functioning after neonatal arterial ischaemic stroke., Method: The population included 60 children (21 females, 39 males) with neonatal arterial ischaemic stroke but not epilepsy. The presence of CP was assessed clinically at the age of 7 years and 2 months (range 6y 11mo-7y 8mo) using the definition of the Surveillance of CP in Europe network. Standardized tests (Nine-Hole Peg Test and Box and Blocks Test) were used to quantify manual (finger and hand respectively) dexterity. General cognitive functioning was evaluated with the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, Fourth Edition. Simple and multiple linear regression models were performed while controlling for socio-economic status, lesion side, and sex., Results: Fifteen children were diagnosed with CP. In simple regression models, both manual dexterity and CP were associated with cognitive functioning (β=0.41 [p=0.002] and β=0.31 [p=0.019] respectively). However, in multiple regression models, manual dexterity was the only associated variable of cognitive functioning, whether or not a child had CP (β=0.35; p=0.007). This result was reproduced in models with other covariables (β=0.31; p=0.017)., Interpretation: As observed in typically developing children, manual dexterity is related to cognitive functioning in children having suffered a focal brain insult during the neonatal period., What This Paper Adds: Manual dexterity predicts cognitive functioning after neonatal arterial ischaemic stroke. Correlations between manual dexterity and cognitive functioning occur irrespective of sex, lesion side, presence of cerebral palsy, and socio-economic status. Residual motor ability may support cognitive functioning., (© 2018 Mac Keith Press.)

According to the ideomotor theory, action selection is done by the mental anticipation of its perceptual consequences. If the distal information processed mainly by vision and hearing are considered essential for the representation of the action, the proximal information processed by the sense of touch and proprioception is of less importance. Recent works seem to show the opposite. Nevertheless, it is necessary to complete these results by offering a situation, more ecological, where response and effect can occur on the same effector. So, the goal of our work was to implement a more relevant spatial correspondence because to touch is not the same action that to hear or to see. To do so, participants pressed a specific key after the presentation of a stimulus. The key vibrated depending on the pressure exerted on it. In a compatible condition, high pressure on a key triggered a high vibration, while in an incompatible condition high pressure triggered a low vibration on the same effectors. As expected, the response times were faster in the compatible condition than the incompatible condition. This means that proximal information participates actively in the selection of action.

Size perception is known to influence our usual interactions with environment. Numerous studies highlighted that during the visual presentation of an object, the properties of manual actions vary as a function of this object's size. In order to better understand the dynamic variations of relationships between size perception and action, we used an experimental paradigm consisting in two phases. During a previous implicit learning phase, a manual response (right or left) was specifically associated with the appearance of a large or small stimulus. During further test phase, participants were required to prepare a response while discriminating the color of a stimulus (GO/No GO task). We observed that the response execution was faster when the size of the stimulus was congruent with the size that had been associated to this response (during implicit learning phase). These results suggest that when a response usually co-occurs with visual stimuli characterized by a specific size pattern, the response and the size pattern become integrated. Any subsequent preparation and execution of this action are therefore influenced by the reactivation of this visual pattern. This result brings out new insights on how sensorimotor interactions may modulate the ability to anticipate perceptive size variations in the environment.

The concept of motor fluency, defined as the positive marking associated with the easy realisation of a movement, is used to explain the various compatibility effects observed between emotional valence and lateral space. In this work, we propose that these effects arise from the motor fluency simulation induced by emotionally positive stimuli. In a perceptual line bisection task (Landmark task) we primed each trial with an emotionally positive word, negative word, neutral word or no word before asking participants to verbally indicate the side of the vertical mark on the horizontal line (Experiment 1) or to indicate the longest side of the line (Experiment 2). After positive words and for bisected lines, participants' responses were biased towards their dominant side for both right- and left-handers and similarly under the two different instructions. As movements of the dominant hand or in the dominant hemispace have been described as the most fluent lateral actions, this result supports our hypothesis that positive stimuli induce a mental simulation of fluent lateral movements. Furthermore, the replication of the effect under opposite instructions between the two experiments is in line with an explanation in terms of a bias in response selection rather than variations in perceptual content.

It is now well established that motor fluency affects cognitive processes, including memory. In two experiments participants learned a list of words and then performed a recognition task. The original feature of our procedure is that before judging the words they had to perform a fluent gesture (i.e., typing a letter dyad). The dyads comprised letters located on either the right or left side of the keyboard. Participants typed dyads with their right or left index finger; the required movement was either very small (dyad composed of adjacent letters, Experiment 1) or slightly larger (dyad composed of letters separated by one key, experiment 2). The results show that when the gesture was performed in the ipsilateral space the probability of recognizing a word increased (to a lesser extent it is the same with the dominant hand, experiment 2). Moreover, a binary regression logistic highlighted that the probability of recognizing a word was proportional to the speed by which the gesture was performed. These results are discussed in terms of a feeling of familiarity emerging from motor discrepancy.

The aim of this study was to provide evidence that actions performed by an individual influence the sensorimotor memory processing and, in particular, the integration process. We conducted 3 experiments that highlighted the multimodal aspect of memory traces. The 1st experiment consisted of a short-term priming paradigm based on 2 phases: a learning phase, consisting of the association between a shape and a sound, and a test phase, examining the priming effect of the shape seen in the learning phase on the processing of target tones. The participants' motor response became a factor in Experiments 2 and 3, allowing us to observe its influence on the integration between the shape and the sound. In Experiment 1, we showed that (a) the prime associated with the sound in the learning phase had an effect on target processing and (b) the component reactivated by the prime was perceptual in nature (i.e., auditory). Experiment 2 showed that the participants' responses were faster when the association of a shape and a sound had been learned with a motor response rather than without. Experiment 3 showed that the integration process required the individual to act while learning the association between the shape and the sound; otherwise no integration effect was observed. Our results highlight the role of motor responses as a necessary criterion for the integration process to take place. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

The simple perception of an object can potentiate an associated action. This affordance effect depends heavily on the action context in which the object is presented. In recent years, psychologists, psychiatrists, and phenomenologists have agreed that subjects with schizophrenia may not perceive the affordances of people or objects that could lead to a loss of ease in their actions. We examined whether the addition of contextually congruent elements, during the perception of everyday objects, could promote the emergence of object-affordance effects in subjects with schizophrenia and controls. Participants performed two Stimulus-Response-Compatibility tasks in which they were presented with semantic primes related to sense of property (Experiment 1) or goal of action (Experiment 2) prior to viewing each graspable object. Controls responded faster when their response hand and the graspable part of the object were compatibly oriented, but only when the context was congruent with the individual's needs and goals. When the context operated as a constraint, the affordance-effect was disrupted. These results support the understanding that object-affordance is flexible and not just intrinsic to an object. However, the absence of this object-affordance effect in subjects with schizophrenia suggests the possible impairment of their ability to experience the internal simulation of motor action potentialities. In such case, all activities of daily life would require the involvement of higher cognitive processes rather than lower level sensorimotor processes. The study of schizophrenia requires the consideration of concepts and methods that arise from the theories of embodied and situated cognition.

Embodied approaches of cognition argue that retrieval involves the re-enactment of both sensory and motor components of the desired remembering. In this study, we investigated the effect of motor action performed to produce the response in a recognition task when this action is compatible with the affordance of the objects that have to be recognised. In our experiment, participants were first asked to learn a list of words referring to graspable objects, and then told to make recognition judgements on pictures. The pictures represented objects where the graspable part was either pointing to the same or to the opposite side of the "Yes" response key. Results show a robust effect of compatibility between objects affordance and response hand. Moreover, this compatibility improves participants' ability of discrimination, suggesting that motor components are relevant cue for memory judgement at the stage of retrieval in a recognition task. More broadly, our data highlight that memory judgements are a function of motor components mappings at the stage of retrieval., (© 2015 International Union of Psychological Science.)

The aim of this study was to show that sensory-motor consequences of past actions form part of memory trace components cued by current experience. In a first task participants had to learn a list of words. Then in a guessing task they played against the computer. Finally, in a recognition task, they had to judge if the words were or were not present in the learning task. Words appeared either in the colour associated with success or failure in the guessing task, or in a non-informative colour. In the first experiment, results show that when the words to be judged were in the colour associated with success, participants answered faster and produced more "old" responses than when the words to be judged were in the colour associated with failure in the previous task. Moreover, when the words to be judged were in the colour associated with failure, participants were slower and produced less "old" responses than when the words were in a colour not informative of success or failure. The second experiment confirms that the results obtained in Experiment 1 were linked to the sensory-motor consequences of past actions associated with the colour and not to the colour itself.