Understanding autonomous behaviour development: Exploring the developmental contributions of context-tracking and task selection to self-directed cognitive control.

Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify, and achieve goals by tracking contextual information and using this information to select relevant tasks. To disentangle the respective contributions of these processes, we manipulated the difficulty of context-tracking via altering the presence or absence of contextual support (Study 1) and the difficulty of task selection by varying task difficulty (a)symmetry (Study 2) in 5-6 and 9-10-year-olds, and adults. Results suggested that, although both processes contribute to successful self-directed engagement of cognitive control, age-related progress mostly relates to context-tracking.

Semantic congruency effects of prime words on tool visual exploration.

Most recent research on human tool use highlighted how people might integrate multiple sources of information through different neurocognitive systems to exploit the environment for action. This mechanism of integration is known as "action reappraisal". In the present eye-tracking study, we further tested the action reappraisal idea by devising a word-priming paradigm to investigate how semantically congruent (e.g., "nail") vs. semantically incongruent words (e.g., "jacket") that preceded the vision of tools (e.g., a hammer) may affect participants' visual exploration of them. We found an implicit modulation of participants' temporal allocation of visuospatial attention as a function of the object-word consistency. Indeed, participants tended to increase over time their fixations on tools' manipulation areas under semantically congruent conditions. Conversely, participants tended to concentrate their visual-spatial attention on tools' functional areas when inconsistent object-word pairs were presented. These results support and extend the information-integrated perspective of the action reappraisal approach. Also, these findings provide further evidence about how higher-level semantic information may influence tools' visual exploration.

Disentangling the Respective Contribution of Task Selection and Task Execution to Self-Directed Cognitive Control Development.

Task selection and task execution are key constructs in cognitive control development. Yet, little is known about how separable they are and how each contributes to task switching performance. Here, 60 4- to 5-year olds, 60 7- to 8-year olds, and 60 10- to 11-year olds children completed the double registration procedure, which dissociates these two processes. Task selection yielded both mixing and switch costs, especially in younger children, and task execution mostly yielded switch costs at all ages, suggesting that task selection is costlier than task execution. Moreover, both task selection and execution varied with task self-directedness (i.e., to what extent the task is driven by external aids) demands. Whereas task selection and task execution are dissociated regarding performance costs, they nevertheless both contribute to self-directed control.

Hazardous tools: the emergence of reasoning in human tool use.

Humans are unique in the way they understand the causal relationships between the use of tools and achieving a goal. The idea at the core of the present research is that tool use can be considered as an instance of problem-solving situations supported by technical reasoning. In an eye-tracking study, we investigated the fixation patterns of participants (N = 32) looking at 3D images of thematically consistent (e.g., nail-steel hammer) and thematically inconsistent (e.g., scarf-steel hammer) object-tool pairs that could be either "hazardous" (accidentally electrified) or not. Results showed that under thematically consistent conditions, participants focused on the tool's manipulation area (e.g., the handle of a steel hammer). However, when electrified tools were present or when the visual scene was not action-prompting, regardless of the presence of electricity, the tools' functional/identity areas (e.g., the head of a steel hammer) were fixated longer than the tools' manipulation areas. These results support an integrated and reasoning-based approach to human tool use and document, for the first time, the crucial role of mechanical/semantic knowledge in tool visual exploration.

Tool and object affordances: An ecological eye-tracking study.

In the present eye-tracking study, we analysed the visuo-spatial attentional patterns of participants looking at 3D images depicting single tools and object-tool pairs. The object-tool pairs could be thematically consistent, thematically inconsistent or spatially inconsistent. During the first 500 ms of visual exploration, tools were fixated longer on their functional area in all experimental conditions. However, extending the time-window of analysis to 1750 ms, the visual scene was encoded in a faster and more suited-for-action way in the thematically consistent condition (e.g., hammer-nail). Most important, the visual exploration of the thematically consistent pairs focused on the manipulation area of the tool (e.g., the handle of the hammer) more than on its functional area (e.g., the head of the hammer). Finally, when single tools were shown and the entire time-window of analysis was considered (1750 ms), fixation focused on the tool's manipulation area. These results are discussed within the reasoning-based framework of tool use. They highlight the relative role of the visuo-perceptual context in affordance perception and suggest a novel interpretation of the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of tools and object-tool pairs in terms of action reappraisal (i.e., a re-functionalization process when the action possibility is mined by the visuo-perceptual context).

Does episodic future thinking improve prospective remembering?

Extant findings suggest interesting avenues for the investigation of the potential relationship between EFT and PM. However, as they stand, they are inconclusive as to the causal role that EFT may play in aiding prospective remembering. In one Experiment, we showed that accuracy in a prospective memory (PM) task performed on the second day was significantly higher when participants, on the first day, had mentally simulated the sequence of events expected to occur on the second day, including the PM task, than when they had performed control tasks. These data extend previous findings on the functional benefit of future simulations in different domains by revealing a substantial facilitation effect of future-oriented thoughts on PM performance when the mentally simulated future task matched the actually executed task.

Episodic future thinking as a predictor of children's prospective memory.

The primary goal of this study was to investigate the relationship among retrospective memory, episodic future thinking, and event-based prospective memory performance in preschool, first-grade, and second-grade children. A total of 160 children took part in the experiment. The study included participants from four age groups: 4-year-olds, 5-year-olds, 6-year-olds, and 7-year-olds. Participants were administered a recognition memory task, a task to test the ability to pre-experience future events, and an event-based prospective memory task. Data were submitted to correlational analyses, analyses of variance (ANOVAs), and logistic regression analyses. Results showed that, overall, all of these abilities improve with age and are significantly correlated with one another. However, when partialling out age and retrospective memory, episodic future thinking and prospective memory performance remained correlated. Logistic regression further showed that age and episodic future thinking abilities were significant predictors of prospective memory performance independent of retrospective memory abilities.

Left-ear-driven representational pseudoneglect for mentally represented real-word scenes created from aural-verbal description.

The current research explored pseudoneglect for the mental representation of real-world scenes generated from aural-verbal description in the complete absence of direct visual processing. Healthy participants listened binaurally or monaurally to aural-verbal descriptions of novel real-world scenes with familiar landmarks (e.g., 'shop', 'cafe', 'school') to be imagined on the left- or right-hand side. Participants were asked to mentally represent the street scene using a visuospatial template though it was up to participants how they mentally represented each individual landmark within the street (i.e., in terms of colour and size). There were two main tasks: a relative judgement task (which side of the street contains the most landmarks?) and a recall task (recall the landmarks on the left vs. right side of the street). When stimuli were presented monaurally to the left ear (favouring the activation of the right hemisphere) participants demonstrated representational pseudoneglect and showed a bias towards responding that there were more landmarks on the left compared to the right. However, this did not lead to enhanced recall for left side landmarks. When stimuli were presented binaurally or monaurally to the right ear, there was no evidence of representational pseudoneglect for the relative judgement or recall task. The current study discusses how the use of monaural presentation may boost right hemisphere activation in aural-verbal experimental paradigms designed to explore representational pseudoneglect.

What differentiates episodic future thinking from complex scene imagery?

We investigated the contributions of familiarity of setting, self-relevance and self-projection in time to episodic future thinking. The role of familiarity of setting was assessed, in Experiment 1, by comparing episodic future thoughts to autobiographical future events supposed to occur in unfamiliar settings. The role of self-relevance was assessed, in Experiment 2, by comparing episodic future thoughts to future events involving familiar others. The role of self-projection in time was assessed, in both Experiments, by comparing episodic future thoughts to autobiographical events that were not temporal in nature. Results indicated that episodic future thoughts were more clearly represented than autobiographical future events occurring in unfamiliar setting and future events involving familiar others. Our results also revealed that episodic future thoughts were indistinguishable from autobiographical atemporal events with respect to both subjective and objective detail ratings. These results suggest that future and atemporal events are mentally represented in a similar way.

Normative data for a battery of free recall, cued recall and recognition tests in the elderly Italian population.

The present study aimed to provide normative data on a large sample of the elderly Italian population (N = 464; range of age = 49-94; range of education = 3-25) on both the word and the picture versions of a battery of free recall, cued recall, and recognition tests of memory. Results from multiple regression analyses showed that both age and education were significant predictors of performance. Therefore, norms were calculated taking into account these demographic variables. The availability of normative data based on a large sample will allow a more reliable use of the battery for clinical assessment in Italian-speaking dementia population.

To do or not to do? Prospective memory versus response inhibition in autism spectrum disorder and attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder.

In the present research, event-based prospective memory and response inhibition (RI) abilities were investigated in children with ASD (Study 1), with ADHD (Study 2), and their matched neurotypical controls. Children engaged in a categorisation (ongoing) task and, concurrently, in either an event-based prospective memory (PM) or a Go/No-Go secondary task. Results showed that, as compared to their matched controls, ASD children's performance was more impaired in the PM task than in the Go/No-Go task, while the performance pattern of ADHD children was reversed. In the ongoing task, ASD children were as accurate as, but significantly slower than, controls, independently of conditions. ADHD children did not differ from controls in the presence of a concurrent PM task, while they were less accurate than controls in the presence of the go/no-go task. Overall, the two patterns of findings suggest important differences in the way ASD and ADHD children remember and realise intentions requiring opposite behaviours (acting vs stopping).

Looking to recognise: the pre-eminence of semantic over sensorimotor processing in human tool use.

Alongside language and bipedal locomotion, tool use is a characterizing activity of human beings. Current theories in the field embrace two contrasting approaches: "manipulation-based" theories, which are anchored in the embodied-cognition view, explain tool use as deriving from past sensorimotor experiences, whereas "reasoning-based" theories suggest that people reason about object properties to solve everyday-life problems. Here, we present results from two eye-tracking experiments in which we manipulated the visuo-perceptual context (thematically consistent vs. inconsistent object-tool pairs) and the goal of the task (free observation or looking to recognise). We found that participants exhibited reversed tools' visual-exploration patterns, focusing on the tool's manipulation area under thematically consistent conditions and on its functional area under thematically inconsistent conditions. Crucially, looking at the tools with the aim of recognising them produced longer fixations on the tools' functional areas irrespective of thematic consistency. In addition, tools (but not objects) were recognised faster in the thematically consistent conditions. These results strongly support reasoning-based theories of tool use, as they indicate that people primarily process semantic rather than sensorimotor information to interact with the environment in an agent's consistent-with-goal way. Such a pre-eminence of semantic processing challenges the mainstream embodied-cognition view of human tool use.

Normative data for the Pyramids and Palm Trees Test in the elderly Italian population.

The Pyramids and Palm Tree Test (PPT) is a semantic memory test that measures the capacity to access detailed semantic information about words and pictures, necessary for the identification of the analogies, which link conceptually two perceptually, and functionally distinct entities. The present study aimed to provide normative data on a large sample of the elderly Italian population (N = 464; range of age = 49-94; range of education = 3-25) on both the word and the picture versions of the PPT. Results from multiple regression analyses showed that both age and education were significant predictors of performance in both the word and the picture versions of the PPT. Therefore, norms were calculated taking into account these demographic variables. The availability of normative data based on a large sample will allow a more reliable use of the PPT for clinical assessment in Italian-speaking dementia population.

Voluntary task switching in children: Switching more reduces the cost of task selection.

Emerging cognitive control supports increasingly efficient goal-directed behaviors. With age, children are increasingly expected to decide autonomously and with little external aid which goals to attain. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in such a self-directed fashion. The present study examined self-directed control development by adapting the voluntary task switching paradigm-the gold standard measure of this control form in adults-for use with 5-6-year-old and 9-10-year-old children. Overall, p(switch) suggested that even younger children can engage self-directed control successfully. However, other measures showed they struggled with task selection. Specifically, compared with older children and adults, they relied more on systematic strategies which reduced the cost of task selection, even when the strategy involved switching more often. Like externally driven control, self-directed control relies critically on task selection processes. These two forms of control likely form a continuum rather than two discrete categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Absolute Memory for Tempo in Musicians and Non-Musicians.

The ability to remember tempo (the perceived frequency of musical pulse) without external references may be defined, by analogy with the notion of absolute pitch, as absolute tempo (AT). Anecdotal reports and sparse empirical evidence suggest that at least some individuals possess AT. However, to our knowledge, no systematic assessments of AT have been performed using laboratory tasks comparable to those assessing absolute pitch. In the present study, we operationalize AT as the ability to identify and reproduce tempo in the absence of rhythmic or melodic frames of reference and assess these abilities in musically trained and untrained participants. We asked 15 musicians and 15 non-musicians to listen to a seven-step `tempo scale' of metronome beats, each associated to a numerical label, and then to perform two memory tasks. In the first task, participants heard one of the tempi and attempted to report the correct label (identification task), in the second, they saw one label and attempted to tap the correct tempo (production task). A musical and visual excerpt was presented between successive trials as a distractor to prevent participants from using previous tempi as anchors. Thus, participants needed to encode tempo information with the corresponding label, store the information, and recall it to give the response. We found that more than half were able to perform above chance in at least one of the tasks, and that musical training differentiated between participants in identification, but not in production. These results suggest that AT is relatively wide-spread, relatively independent of musical training in tempo production, but further refined by training in tempo identification. We propose that at least in production, the underlying motor representations are related to tactus, a basic internal rhythmic period that may provide a body-based reference for encoding tempo.

Effects of Material and Non-Material Rewards on Remembering to Do Things for Others.

Recent research has shown that pro-social prospective memory, i.e., remembering to do something for others, is negatively affected by the presence of small material rewards. While this competition between pro-social and self-gain motives leads to poor memory for the intention, people do not seem to be aware of the possible collision effects of competing motives (Brandimonte et al., 2010). Extending research on this general topic, in two activity-based prospective memory (PM) experiments, we explored the effects of different types and amount of rewards on pro-social prospective remembering. In Experiment 1, participants could receive no reward, a low material reward (1 euro), or a high material reward (20 euro) for their pro-social PM action. In Experiment 2, their pro-social PM performance could be rewarded or not with an image reward (disclosure of their altruistic behavior). Results revealed that introducing a small material reward (Experiment 1) or a non-material reward (Experiment 2) impaired pro-social PM. However, introducing a high material reward eliminated the impairment (Experiment 1). Importantly, in Experiment 1, ongoing task performance in the pro-social condition was faster than in the No PM condition. However, in Experiment 2, ongoing task costs emerged in the presence of a non-material reward, as compared to the pro-social condition. Also, results from two independent ratings showed that people's predictions on their future pro-social actions were at odds (Experiment 1) or in line (Experiment 2) with actual PM performance. It is suggested that, according to the nature and amount of rewards, memory for a pro-social future action may be modulated by conscious or unconscious motivational mechanisms.

When do words hurt? A multiprocess view of the effects of verbalization on visual memory.

Verbal overshadowing reflects the impairment in memory performance following verbalization of nonverbal stimuli. However, it is not clear whether the same mechanisms are responsible for verbal overshadowing effects observed with different stimuli and task demands. In the present article, we propose a multiprocess view that reconciles the main theoretical explanations of verbal overshadowing deriving from the use of different paradigms. Within a single paradigm, we manipulated both the nature of verbalization at encoding (nameability of the stimuli) and postencoding (verbal descriptions), as well as the nature (image transformation or recognition) and, by implication, the demands of the final memory task (global or featural). Results from 3 experiments replicated the negative effects of encoding and postencoding verbalization in imagery and recognition tasks, respectively. However, they also showed that the demands of the final memory task can modulate or even reverse verbal overshadowing effects due to both postencoding verbalization and naming during encoding.

Dissociating positive and negative influences of verbal processing on the recognition of pictures of faces and objects.

Four experiments investigated the role of verbal processing in the recognition of pictures of faces and objects. We used (a) a stimulus-encoding task where participants learned sequentially presented pictures in control, articulatory suppression, and describe conditions and then engaged in an old-new picture recognition test and (b) a poststimulus-encoding task where participants learned the stimuli without any secondary task and then either described or not a single item from memory before the recognition test. The main findings were as follows: First, verbalization influenced picture recognition. Second, there were contrasting influences of verbalization on the recognition of faces, compared with objects, that were driven by (a) the stage of processing during which verbalization took place (as assessed by the stimulus-encoding and poststimulus-encoding tasks), (b) whether verbalization was subvocal (whereby one goes through the motions of speaking but without making any sound) or overt, and (c) stimulus familiarity. During stimulus encoding there was a double dissociation whereby subvocal verbalization interfered with the recognition of faces but not objects, while overt verbalization benefited the recognition of objects but not faces. In addition, stimulus familiarity provided an independent and beneficial influence on performance. Post stimulus encoding, overt verbalization interfered with the recognition of both faces and objects, and this interference was apparent for unfamiliar but not familiar stimuli. Together these findings extend work on verbalization to picture recognition and place important parameters on stimulus and task constraints that contribute to contrasting beneficial and detrimental effects of verbalization on recognition memory.

The role of past in the simulation of autobiographical future episodes.

Human beings' ability to envisage the future has been recently assumed to rely on the reconstructive nature of episodic memory (Schacter & Addis, 2007). In the present research, young adults mentally reexperienced and preexperienced temporally close and distant autobiographical episodes, and rated their phenomenal characteristics as well as their novelty. Additionally, they performed a delayed recognition task including remember-know judgments on new, old-remember, and old-imagine words. Results showed that past and future temporally close episodes included more phenomenal details than distant episodes, in line with earlier studies. However, future events were occasionally rated as already occurred in the past. Furthermore, in the recognition task, participants falsely attributed old-imagine words to remembered episodes. While partially in line with previous results, these findings call for a more subtle analysis in order to discriminate representations of past episodes from true future events simulations.