Known-groups and convergent validity of the theory of mind task battery in children with autism spectrum disorder.

OBJECTIVES: One of the most promising Theory of Mind (ToM) tests developed for children with ASD is the Theory of Mind Task Battery (ToM-TB). Still, additional psychometric properties of this tool need to be assessed. The main objective of this preregistered study was to investigate the known-groups and convergent validities of the ToM-TB compared to a well-established test used to assess ToM in children with ASD (the Strange Stories Test; SST). METHODS: A total of 68 school-aged children were recruited (34 children with ASD and 34 children with typical development). The groups were matched on sex and age, and on both receptive language abilities and overall cognitive functioning. RESULTS: Regarding the known-groups validity, we found group differences in the performance on the ToM-TB and SST. Additional analyses revealed that this result tended to be more robust for the ToM-TB than for the SST. Regarding convergent validity, we showed that the ToM-TB and SST correlated strongly, for children with ASD and children with typical development. In contrast, we found small correlations of these two tests with social competence in daily life. No evidence was found for greater known-groups or convergent validity of one test compared to the other. CONCLUSION: Our data confirmed the relevance of the ToM-TB and the SST for the assessment of ToM in school-aged children. Future studies should continue to assess the psychometric qualities of various ToM tests to provide reliable information to best guide researchers and clinicians when choosing optimal neuropsychological tools.

The interplay between the importance of a decision and emotion in decision-making.

Decision-making literature has demonstrated that individuals' preferences are strongly affected by the way in which choices are presented. This cognitive bias, termed the framing effect, is influenced by the importance of the possible outcomes that a decision can have. However, the direction of this influence remains poorly understood. The aim of this paper was to examine the role of the importance of a decision in framing susceptibility and to explore a potential mechanism underlying this influence. Our first study revealed that participants display a framing effect when their decision implies a high importance outcome, but resist framing manipulation when their decision implies a low importance outcome. Our second study confirmed that an increase in the importance of a decision is associated with increasing framing susceptibility. Moreover, a moderated mediation analysis revealed that the more a decision was important, the more the gain and loss frames aroused opposite emotions, and this accounted for the increase in framing susceptibility. The results of these two studies confirmed that an increase in the importance of a decision is associated with increasing framing susceptibility and suggest that this influence on framing susceptibility is underpinned by emotion. Implications and direction for future studies are discussed.

Is the framing effect a framing affect?

Over the past 30 years, researchers have shown that human choices are highly sensitive to the ways in which alternatives are presented. For example, when individuals face a choice between a sure and a risky option, their willingness to take risks varies depending on whether the alternatives are framed in terms of gain or loss. The current major hypothesis that explains such a framing effect predicts that compared with an equivalent risky option, sure gains are emotionally attractive and sure losses are emotionally aversive. Using a behavioural paradigm, the main objective of the current study was to experimentally observe the extent to which the emotional attraction to sure gains and aversion to sure losses are at the core of framing susceptibility. First, our results showed that, as the literature suggests, the emotional attraction to sure gains and aversion to sure losses underpin the framing effect. Second, our results showed that methodological factors moderated the role of these emotional mechanisms in the framing effect. Implications and directions for future studies are discussed.

Brief Report: Risk-Aversion and Rationality in Autism Spectrum Disorders.

Risk-aversion and rationality have both been highlighted as core features of decision making in individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD). This study tested whether risk-aversion is related to rational decision-making in ASD individuals. ASD and matched control adults completed a decision-making task that discriminated between the use of risk-averse and rational strategies. Results showed that overall, ASD participants were more risk-averse than control participants. Specifically, both groups made similar choices when risk-aversion was the less rational strategy but ASD participants chose more rational options than control participants when risk-aversion was the most rational strategy. This study confirmed that risk-aversion is a core feature of ASD and revealed that ASD individuals can switch their decision-making strategy adaptively to avoid negative consequences.

Relationship between pathological gambling, alexithymia, and gambling type.

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES: The aim of this study is to see if: (i) alexithymia is associated with PG and with the severity of gambling behavior; (ii) alexithymia is associated with strategic and non-strategic gambling. METHODS: Two hundred and twenty-six gamblers were recruited in different gambling locations. First, pathological gamblers (PGs) (n = 106) were compared to non-pathological gamblers (NPGs) (n = 120). Second, strategic gamblers (n = 92) were compared to non-strategic gamblers (n = 96). RESULTS: After controlling for being or not depressed, PGs have significantly higher alexithymia scores. Alexithymia is positively correlated to the intensity of gambling behavior and associated with PG: being alexithymic (OR = 4.21, SEB = .32, p < .001), "difficulty identifying feelings" (OR = 1.07, SEB = .03, p = .038), and "externally-oriented thinking" (OR = 1.07, SEB = .03, p = .026) factors. Nevertheless, while alexithymia is associated with PG in strategic gamblers (being alexithymic (OR = 6.80, SEB = .50 p < .001) and "difficulty identifying feelings" (OR = 1.12, SEB = .05 p = .026) factor), this is not the case in non-strategic gamblers. In the latter, only depression is associated with PG (OR = 3.43, SEB = .50 p = .013). DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION: The results highlight the importance of taking into account the gambling type in the relationship between alexithymia, depression, and PG. SCIENTIFIC SIGNIFICANCE: In non-strategic PGs, specific therapies targeting depression could be appropriate, while for strategic PGs, specific psychotherapeutic techniques like body-centered psychotherapy could help them to differentiate feelings from bodily sensations. (Am J Addict 2017;26:152-160).

High But Not Low Probability of Gain Elicits a Positive Feeling Leading to the Framing Effect.

Human risky decision-making is known to be highly susceptible to profit-motivated responses elicited by the way in which options are framed. In fact, studies investigating the framing effect have shown that the choice between sure and risky options depends on how these options are presented. Interestingly, the probability of gain of the risky option has been highlighted as one of the main factors causing variations in susceptibility to the framing effect. However, while it has been shown that high probabilities of gain of the risky option systematically lead to framing bias, questions remain about the influence of low probabilities of gain. Therefore, the first aim of this paper was to clarify the respective roles of high and low probabilities of gain in the framing effect. Due to the difference between studies using a within- or between-subjects design, we conducted a first study investigating the respective roles of these designs. For both designs, we showed that trials with a high probability of gain led to the framing effect whereas those with a low probability did not. Second, as emotions are known to play a key role in the framing effect, we sought to determine whether they are responsible for such a debiasing effect of the low probability of gain. Our second study thus investigated the relationship between emotion and the framing effect depending on high and low probabilities. Our results revealed that positive emotion was related to risk-seeking in the loss frame, but only for trials with a high probability of gain. Taken together, these results support the interpretation that low probabilities of gain suppress the framing effect because they prevent the positive emotion of gain anticipation.

Priming Children's Use of Intentions in Moral Judgement with Metacognitive Training.

Typically, adults give a primary role to the agent's intention to harm when performing a moral judgment of accidental harm. By contrast, children often focus on outcomes, underestimating the actor's mental states when judging someone for his action, and rely on what we suppose to be intuitive and emotional processes. The present study explored the processes involved in the development of the capacity to integrate agents' intentions into their moral judgment of accidental harm in 5 to 8-year-old children. This was done by the use of different metacognitive trainings reinforcing different abilities involved in moral judgments (mentalising abilities, executive abilities, or no reinforcement), similar to a paradigm previously used in the field of deductive logic. Children's moral judgments were gathered before and after the training with non-verbal cartoons depicting agents whose actions differed only based on their causal role or their intention to harm. We demonstrated that a metacognitive training could induce an important shift in children's moral abilities, showing that only children who were explicitly instructed to "not focus too much" on the consequences of accidental harm, preferentially weighted the agents' intentions in their moral judgments. Our findings confirm that children between the ages of 5 and 8 are sensitive to the intention of agents, however, at that age, this ability is insufficient in order to give a "mature" moral judgment. Our experiment is the first that suggests the critical role of inhibitory resources in processing accidental harm.

Neurodynamics of executive control processes in bilinguals: evidence from ERP and source reconstruction analyses.

The present study was designed to examine the impact of bilingualism on the neuronal activity in different executive control processes namely conflict monitoring, control implementation (i.e., interference suppression and conflict resolution) and overcoming of inhibition. Twenty-two highly proficient but non-balanced successive French-German bilingual adults and 22 monolingual adults performed a combined Stroop/Negative priming task while event-related potential (ERP) were recorded online. The data revealed that the ERP effects were reduced in bilinguals in comparison to monolinguals but only in the Stroop task and limited to the N400 and the sustained fronto-central negative-going potential time windows. This result suggests that bilingualism may impact the process of control implementation rather than the process of conflict monitoring (N200). Critically, our study revealed a differential time course of the involvement of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in conflict processing. While the ACC showed major activation in the early time windows (N200 and N400) but not in the latest time window (late sustained negative-going potential), the PFC became unilaterally active in the left hemisphere in the N400 and the late sustained negative-going potential time windows. Taken together, the present electroencephalography data lend support to a cascading neurophysiological model of executive control processes, in which ACC and PFC may play a determining role.

Helping reasoners succeed in the Wason selection task: when executive learning discourages heuristic response but does not necessarily encourage logic.

Reasoners make systematic logical errors by giving heuristic responses that reflect deviations from the logical norm. Influential studies have suggested first that our reasoning is often biased because we minimize cognitive effort to surpass a cognitive conflict between heuristic response from system 1 and analytic response from system 2 thinking. Additionally, cognitive control processes might be necessary to inhibit system 1 responses to activate a system 2 response. Previous studies have shown a significant effect of executive learning (EL) on adults who have transferred knowledge acquired on the Wason selection task (WST) to another isomorphic task, the rule falsification task (RFT). The original paradigm consisted of teaching participants to inhibit a classical matching heuristic that sufficed the first problem and led to significant EL transfer on the second problem. Interestingly, the reasoning tasks differed in inhibiting-heuristic metacognitive cost. Success on the WST requires half-suppression of the matching elements. In contrast, the RFT necessitates a global rejection of the matching elements for a correct answer. Therefore, metacognitive learning difficulty most likely differs depending on whether one uses the first or second task during the learning phase. We aimed to investigate this difficulty and various matching-bias inhibition effects in a new (reversed) paradigm. In this case, the transfer effect from the RFT to the WST could be more difficult because the reasoner learns to reject all matching elements in the first task. We observed that the EL leads to a significant reduction in matching selections on the WST without increasing logical performances. Interestingly, the acquired metacognitive knowledge was too "strictly" transferred and discouraged matching rather than encouraging logic. This finding underlines the complexity of learning transfer and adds new evidence to the pedagogy of reasoning.

Fear and anger have opposite effects on risk seeking in the gain frame.

Emotions strongly influence our decisions, particularly those made under risk. A classic example of the effect of emotion on decision making under risk is the "framing effect," which involves predictable shifts in preferences when the same problem is formulated in different ways. According to dual process theories, this bias could stem from an affective heuristic belonging to an intuitive type of reasoning. In this study, we examined whether specific incidental negative emotions (i.e., fear and anger) influence framing susceptibility and risk-taking identically. In each trial, participants received an initial amount of money, and pictures of angry or fearful faces were presented to them. Finally, participants chose between a sure option and a gamble option of equally expected value in a gain or loss frame. Risk-taking was modulated by emotional context: fear and anger influenced risk-taking specifically in the gain frame and had opposite effects. Fear increased risk-averse choices, whereas anger decreased risk-averse choices, leading to a suppression of the framing effect. These results confirm that emotions play a key role in framing susceptibility.

Does ambiguity aversion influence the framing effect during decision making?

Decision-makers present a systematic tendency to avoid ambiguous options for which the level of risk is unknown. This ambiguity aversion is one of the most striking decision-making biases. Given that human choices strongly depend on the options' presentation, the purpose of the present study was to examine whether ambiguity aversion influences the framing effect during decision making. We designed a new financial decision-making task involving the manipulation of both frame and uncertainty levels. Thirty-seven participants had to choose between a sure option and a gamble depicting either clear or ambiguous probabilities. The results revealed a clear preference for the sure option in the ambiguity condition regardless of frame. However, participants presented a framing effect in both the risk and ambiguity conditions. Indeed, the framing effect was bidirectional in the risk condition and unidirectional in the ambiguity condition given that it did not involve preference reversal but only a more extreme choice tendency.

The impact of alexithymia on pathological gamblers' decision making: a preliminary study of gamblers recruited in "sportsbook" casinos.

OBJECTIVE: We investigated whether alexithymia is at the root of the decision-making deficit classically reported in pathological gamblers. BACKGROUND: Alexithymia has been shown to be a recurrent personality trait of pathological gamblers and to impair the decision-making abilities of nonpathological gamblers, but no previous studies have investigated whether alexithymia significantly affects pathological gamblers' decision making. Although investigations of pathological gamblers typically have studied those seeking treatment, most pathological gamblers do not seek treatment. Thus, to study people representative of the general population of pathological gamblers, we conducted our study in "sportsbook" casinos with a small sample of gamblers who were not seeking treatment. METHODS: We recruited gamblers in sportsbooks and classified them based on their scores on the South Oaks Gambling Screen and the Toronto Alexithymia Scale: 3 groups of pathological gamblers (6 alexithymic, 8 possibly alexithymic, and 6 nonalexithymic) and 8 healthy controls. All of the participants completed an adaptation of the Iowa Gambling Task. RESULTS: The alexithymic group chose less advantageously on the task than the other groups. The severity of the deficit in decision-making abilities was related to the severity of alexithymia, even when we controlled for the effects of anxiety and depression. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings provide preliminary evidence that alexithymia might be a critical personality trait underlying pathological gamblers' decision-making deficits.

Impact of emotional context congruency on decision making under ambiguity.

In this study, we tested the somatic marker hypothesis (SMH) by using an adaptation of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) in which the emotional context associated with primary inducers was systematically manipulated. In this modified version of the IGT, a picture of either a happy face or a fearful face was presented after each feedback. Critically, the expression of the face was either congruent or incongruent with the feedback delivered. Analyses of participants' choices revealed that the congruency of the emotional context with the feedback affects performance on the IGT: The ability to choose advantageously increases when the emotional context is congruent with feedback (i.e., happy faces after rewards and fearful ones after punishments), whereas this ability is impaired with an incongruent emotional context (i.e., fearful faces after rewards and happy faces after punishments). These findings provide evidence that decision making under ambiguity is driven by emotion-related signals, as postulated by the SMH.

Is human decision making under ambiguity guided by loss frequency regardless of the costs? A developmental study using the Soochow Gambling Task.

Converging developmental decision-making studies have demonstrated that until late adolescence, individuals prefer options for which the risk of a loss is low regardless of the final outcome. Recent works have shown a similar inability to consider both loss frequency and final outcome among adults. The current study aimed to identify developmental changes in feedback-monitoring ability to consider both loss frequency and final outcome in decision making under ambiguity. Children, adolescents, and adults performed an adapted version of the Soochow Gambling Task. Our results showed that children and adolescents presented an exclusive preference for options associated with infrequent punishment. In contrast, only adults seemed to consider both loss frequency and the final outcome by favoring the advantageous options when the frequency of losses was low. These findings suggest that the ability to integrate both loss frequency and final outcome develops with age. Moreover, the analysis of strategic adjustments following gains and losses reveals that adults switch less often after losses compared with children and adolescents. This finding suggests that psychological tolerance to loss may facilitate learning the characteristics of each option and improve the ability to choose advantageously.

Positive emotional context eliminates the framing effect in decision-making.

Dual-process theories have suggested that emotion plays a key role in the framing effect in decision-making. However, little is known about the potential impact of a specific positive or negative emotional context on this bias. We investigated this question with adult participants using an emotional priming paradigm. First, participants were presented with positive or negative affective pictures (i.e., pleasant vs. unpleasant photographs). Afterward, participants had to perform a financial decision-making task that was unrelated to the pictures previously presented. The results revealed that the presentation framed in terms of gain or loss no longer affected subjects' decision-making following specific exposure to emotionally pleasant pictures. Interestingly, a positive emotional context did not globally influence risk-taking behavior but specifically decreased the risk propensity in the loss frame. This finding confirmed that a positive emotional context can reduce loss aversion, and it strongly reinforced the dual-process view that the framing effect stems from an affective heuristic belonging to intuitive System 1.

Impact of prenatal diagnosis on neurocognitive outcomes in children with transposition of the great arteries.

OBJECTIVES: To assess the effect of prenatal diagnosis of congenital heart disease on neurocognitive outcomes in children with d-transposition of the great arteries (TGA) after surgical correction. STUDY DESIGN: A prospective study of children born with a TGA between 2003 and 2005 and aged 4 to 6 years was conducted. General intelligence, language, executive functions, and social cognition scores and preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative factors were evaluated according to time of TGA diagnosis. Neurocognitive data were also compared with a control group. RESULTS: Forty-five eligible patients (67% male) were examined; 29 had a prenatal diagnosis of TGA and 16 did not. All children were comparable in age, sex, and demographic variables. Diagnostic groups did not differ in preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative variables. Preoperative acidosis was more frequent in the postnatal group (18% versus 3%). All patients had normal IQ scores, language, and verbal working memory. However, neurocognitive deficits were more prevalent and more severe in children with a postnatal-TGA. Prenatal diagnosis was associated with better outcomes in executive functions. CONCLUSIONS: Prenatal diagnosis of TGA is associated with better neurocognitive outcomes. Time of diagnosis may influence the development of early complex cognitive skills such as executive functions.

A new window on neurocognitive dysfunction in the childhood form of myotonic dystrophy type 1 (DM1).

Not much is known about the neurocognitive deficits in the childhood phenotypic expression of DM1. Twenty-four children and adolescents with no mental retardation were administered an extensive neuropsychological battery to investigate cognition in terms of memory, executive functions and visuo-spatial abilities. The results showed discrepancies between Wechsler's indexes with higher scores in Verbal Comprehension than Perceptive Organization and Speed of Processing. Memory assessment using Signoret's Memory Battery revealed a clear difference between verbal and visuospatial memory but no impairment between short and long-term memory. Concerning executive abilities, DM1 subjects showed greater deficits in processing speed than in mental flexibility, inhibition or working memory. This pattern of deficits could implicate a frontoparietal circuit in accordance with the neural networks involved in the adult form of DM1 and reopens the question of a continuum between childhood and adulthood neurocognitive impairments.

Developmental changes of win-stay and loss-shift strategies in decision making.

This study aims to clarify the developmental changes in real-life decision making when strategy is adjusted using both positive and negative feedback, that is, whether strategic adjustment evolves with age. A total of 84 participants divided into three age groups (children, adolescents, and adults) performed the standard version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Children and adolescents showed a strong bias in favor of disadvantageous choices whereas adults learned to decide advantageously during the course of the task. Interestingly, the results clearly demonstrate that children did not switch differently following gains and losses whereas adolescents and adults switched more often after a loss than after a gain, corresponding to the "loss-shift" and the "win-stay" strategies, respectively. The results also revealed that adults switched less often after losses compared to children and adolescents and, thus, used the loss-stay strategy more often than the 2 youngest groups. These new findings suggest that successful completion of the IGT by adults requires fine feedback monitoring and more frequent use of the win-stay and loss-stay strategic adjustments.

How to explain receptivity to conjunction-fallacy inhibition training: evidence from the Iowa gambling task.

Intuitive predictions and judgments under conditions of uncertainty are often mediated by judgment heuristics that sometimes lead to biases. Using the classical conjunction bias example, the present study examines the relationship between receptivity to metacognitive executive training and emotion-based learning ability indexed by Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) performance. After completing a computerised version of the IGT, participants were trained to avoid conjunction bias on a frequency judgment task derived from the works of Tversky and Kahneman. Pre- and post-test performances were assessed via another probability judgment task. Results clearly showed that participants who produced a biased answer despite the experimental training (individual patterns of the biased --> biased type) mainly had less emotion-based learning ability in IGT. Better emotion-based learning ability was observed in participants whose response pattern was biased --> logical. These findings argue in favour of the capacity of the human mind/brain to overcome reasoning bias when trained under executive programming conditions and as a function of emotional warning sensitivity.

Syllogistic reasoning and belief-bias inhibition in school children: evidence from a negative priming paradigm.

Research on deductive reasoning in adolescents and adults has shown that errors in deductive logic are not necessarily due to a lack of logical ability but can stem from an executive failure to inhibit biases. Few studies have examined this dissociation in children. Here, we used a negative priming paradigm with 64 children (8-10 years old) to test the role of cognitive inhibition in syllogisms with belief-bias effects. On trials where negative priming was predicted, results were as follows: For the first syllogism (A), the strategy 'unbelievable-equals-invalid' had to be inhibited. The logic of the syllogism led to affirming a conclusion inconsistent with one's knowledge of the world, such as 'All elephants are light.' For the second syllogism (B), one's real-world knowledge and the syllogism's logic were congruent but the latter required affirming exactly what had been inhibited for A (i.e. that elephants are heavy). A negative priming effect on the A-B sequence was reflected in a significant drop in reasoning performance on B. This supports the idea that during cognitive development, inhibitory control is required for success on syllogisms where beliefs and logic interfere.