Tactile sensory processing as a precursor of executive attention: Toward early detection of attention impairments and neurodevelopmental disorders.

Recent studies in developmental neuroscience tend to show the existence of neural attention networks from birth. Their construction is based on the first sensory experiences that allow us to learn the patterns of the world surrounding us and preserve our limited attentional resources. Touch is the first sensory modality to develop, although it is still little studied in developmental psychology in contrast to distal modalities such as audition or vision. Atypical tactile sensory processing at an early age could predict later attention dysfunction, both of them being part of the symptomatology of neurodevelopmental disorders (NDD). We review the state of knowledge on tactile sensory processing and its links with attention, executive attention (EA) in particular, and propose that abnormal tactile sensory processing at an early age could provide markers of EA dysfunctions, contributing to the early detection of NDD. This article is categorized under: Psychology > Attention.

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.

Draw me a brain: The use of drawing as a tool to examine children's developing knowledge about the "black box".

Recent studies in neuroeducation highlight the benefits of teaching children about how the brain works. However, very little is known about children's naive conceptions about the brain. The current study examined these representations, by asking 6-10 year-old children (N = 257) and adults (N = 38) to draw a brain and the inside of a belly as a control drawing. The drawings were scored using a content analysis and a list of graphic indicators was derived. First, all the graphic indicators used in the brain drawings were different from those used in the belly drawings, suggesting that children are able to distinguish these two organs. Second, with age, children depict (i) an increasing number of indicators, (ii) more complex indicators, (iii) indicators that are more anatomically correct, to depict the brain. There is an important evolution between 6 and 8 years-old but also between 10 years-old and adults. These results are discussed in relation to children's metacognitive knowledge and to their implications for neuroeducation.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging study of Piaget's conservation-of-number task in preschool and school-age children: a neo-Piagetian approach.

Jean Piaget's theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in children's thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to number conservation. In the current study, preschool children (nonconservers, 5-6 years of age) and school-age children (conservers, 9-10 years of age) were presented with Piaget's conservation-of-number task and monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The cognitive change allowing children to access conservation was shown to be related to the neural contribution of a bilateral parietofrontal network involved in numerical and executive functions. These fMRI results highlight how the behavioral and cognitive stages Piaget formulated during the 20th century manifest in the brain with age.

Mapping numerical processing, reading, and executive functions in the developing brain: an fMRI meta-analysis of 52 studies including 842 children.

Tracing the connections from brain functions to children's cognitive development and education is a major goal of modern neuroscience. We performed the first meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained over the past decade (1999-2008) on more than 800 children and adolescents in three core systems of cognitive development and school learning: numerical abilities, reading, and executive functions (i.e. cognitive control). We ran Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analyses to obtain regions of reliable activity across all the studies. The results indicate that, unlike results usually reported for adults, children primarily engage the frontal cortex when solving numerical tasks. With age, there may be a shift from reliance on the frontal cortex to reliance on the parietal cortex. In contrast, the frontal, temporo-parietal and occipito-temporal regions at work during reading in children are very similar to those reported in adults. The executive frontal regions are also consistent with the imaging literature on cognitive control in adults, but the developmental comparison between children and adolescents demonstrates a key role of the anterior insular cortex (AIC) with an additional right AIC involvement in adolescents.

Adult brains don't fully overcome biases that lead to incorrect performance during cognitive development: an fMRI study in young adults completing a Piaget-like task.

A current issue in developmental science is that greater continuity in cognition between children and adults may exist than is usually appreciated in Piaget-like (stages or 'staircase') models. This phenomenon has been demonstrated at the behavioural level, but never at the brain level. Here we show with functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), for the first time, that adult brains do not fully overcome the biases of childhood. More specifically, the aim of this fMRI study was to evaluate whether the perceptual bias that leads to incorrect performance during cognitive development in a Piaget-like task is still a bias in the adult brain and hence requires an executive network to overcome it. Here, we compared two numerical-judgment tasks, one being a Piaget-like task with number-length interference (called 'INT') and the other being a control task with number-length covariation ('COV'). We also used a colour-detection task to control for stimuli numerosity, spatial distribution, and frequency. Our behavioural results confirmed that INT remains a difficult task for young adults. Indeed, response times were significantly higher in INT than in COV. Moreover, we observed that only in INT did response times increase linearly as a function of the number of items. The fMRI results indicate that the brain network common to INT and COV shows a large rightward functional asymmetry, emphasizing the visuospatial nature of these two tasks. When INT was compared with COV, activations were found within a right frontal network, including the pre-supplementary motor area, the anterior cingulate cortex, and the middle frontal gyrus, which probably reflect detection of the number/length conflict and inhibition of the 'length-equals-number' response strategy. Finally, activations related to visuospatial and quantitative processing, enhanced or specifically recruited in the Piaget-like task, were found in bilateral posterior areas.

Math in actions: actor mode reveals the true arithmetic abilities of French-speaking 2-year-olds in a magic task.

Our previous studies provide some evidence of between-language effects on arithmetic performance in 2-year-olds. French-speaking children were especially biased by the use of the word un as a cardinal value and as an article in the singular/plural opposition (1 vs. the set 2, 3, ...). Here we evaluated the ability of a new action-based assessment method to avoid this bias. A total of 80 French-speaking 2- and 3-year-olds were confronted with impossible (1+1=1 or 1+1=3) and possible (1+1=2) addition problems that triggered the bias. The problems were either presented to the children by the experimenter (onlooker mode) or realized by themselves (actor mode). The 2-year-olds performed better in the actor mode than in the onlooker mode. A subtraction control with no language ambiguity (2-1=2 or 1) was conducted with 80 other children; both modes elicited comparable performances regardless of age. These data indicate that the actor mode is effective for assessing arithmetic ability in French-speaking 2-year-olds.

Interaction with a high-versus low-competence influence source in inductive reasoning.

Literature on inductive reasoning shows that when testing hypotheses, people are biased toward the use of confirmatory strategies (P. C. Wason, 1960). In the present article, the authors presented 2 studies showing how people use confirmation and disconfirmation strategies during actual interaction in problem solving. Study 1 showed that participants were able to learn to use disconfirmation when confronted with a low-competence, nonthreatening partner. When the partner was high in competence (thereby threatening the participant's competence), participants used confirmation, even when the partner used disconfirmation. In Study 2, the authors aimed at generalizing the aforementioned results by exploring the hypothesis that disconfirmation stems from the possibility of diverging from norms. Participants who were confronted with the violation of a conversational norm used a high proportion of disconfirmation, whatever the source of influence. When there was no violation but there was a low-competence partner, the proportion of disconfirmation was high; when there was no violation but there was a high-competence partner, the proportion of disconfirmation was low. The authors discussed the interpersonal functions of confirmation and disconfirmation.

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.

Bats, balls, and substitution sensitivity: cognitive misers are no happy fools.

Influential work on human thinking suggests that our judgment is often biased because we minimize cognitive effort and intuitively substitute hard questions by easier ones. A key question is whether or not people realize that they are doing this and notice their mistake. Here, we test this claim with one of the most publicized examples of the substitution bias, the bat-and-ball problem. We designed an isomorphic control version in which reasoners experience no intuitive pull to substitute. Results show that people are less confident in their substituted, erroneous bat-and-ball answer than in their answer on the control version that does not give rise to the substitution. Contrary to popular belief, this basic finding indicates that biased reasoners are not completely oblivious to the substitution and sense that their answer is questionable. This calls into question the characterization of the human reasoner as a happy fool who blindly answers erroneous questions without realizing it.

Dynamics of the anatomical changes that occur in the brains of schoolchildren as they learn to read.

Although the functional brain network involved in reading for adults and children is now well documented, a critical lack of knowledge still exists about the structural development of these brain areas. To provide a better overview of the structural dynamics of the brain that sustain reading acquisition, we acquired anatomical MRI brain images from 55 children that were divided into two groups: one prior to the formal learning of reading (n = 33, 5-6 years old) and the second a few years after formal learning (n = 22, 9-10 years old). Reading performances were collected based on the "Alouette-R" test, a standardized test for reading text in French. Voxel-based morphometry analysis of gray matter showed that only the right insula volume was different between the two groups. Moreover, the reading group showed that the volumes of the left fusiform gyrus (corresponding to the well-known visual word form area, VWFA), the anterior part of the left inferior occipital gyrus and the left thalamus were significantly modulated by reading performance. This study reinforces the crucial role of the Visual Word Form Area in reading and correlation analyses performed between ROIs volumes suggesting that the VWFA is fully connected with the traditional left-hemispheric language brain network.

Numerical Transcoding Proficiency in 10-Year-Old Schoolchildren is Associated with Gray Matter Inter-Individual Differences: A Voxel-Based Morphometry Study.

Are individual differences in numerical performance sustained by variations in gray matter volume in schoolchildren? To our knowledge, this challenging question for neuroeducation has not yet been investigated in typical development. We used the Voxel-Based Morphometry method to search for possible structural brain differences between two groups of 10-year-old schoolchildren (N = 22) whose performance differed only in numerical transcoding between analog and symbolic systems. The results indicated that children with low numerical proficiency have less gray matter volume in the parietal (particularly in the left intraparietal sulcus and the bilateral angular gyri) and occipito-temporal areas. All the identified regions have previously been shown to be functionally involved in transcoding between analog and symbolic numerical systems. Our data contribute to a better understanding of the intertwined relationships between mathematics learning and brain structure in healthy schoolchildren.

Structural brain correlates of executive engagement in working memory: children's inter-individual differences are reflected in the anterior insular cortex.

Although the development of executive functions has been extensively investigated at a neurofunctional level, studies of the structural relationships between executive functions and brain anatomy are still scarce. Based on our previous meta-analysis of functional neuroimaging studies examining executive functions in children (Houdé, Rossi, Lubin, and Joliot, (2010). Developmental Science, 13, 876-885), we investigated six a priori regions of interest: the left anterior insular cortex (AIC), the left and the right supplementary motor areas, the right middle and superior frontal gyri, and the left precentral gyrus. Structural magnetic resonance imaging scans were acquired from 22 to 10-year-old children. Local gray matter volumes, assessed automatically using a standard voxel-based morphometry approach, were correlated with executive and storage working memory capacities evaluated using backward and forward digit span tasks, respectively. We found an association between smaller gray matter volume--i.e., an index of neural maturation--in the left AIC and high backward memory span while gray matter volumes in the a priori selected regions of interest were not linked with forward memory span. These results were corroborated by a whole-brain a priori free analysis that revealed a significant negative correlation in the frontal and prefrontal regions, including the left AIC, with the backward memory span, and in the right inferior parietal lobe, with the forward memory span. Taken together, these results suggest a distinct and specific association between regional gray matter volume and the executive component vs. the storage component of working memory. Moreover, they support a key role for the AIC in the executive network of children.

Number conservation is related to children's prefrontal inhibitory control: an fMRI study of a piagetian task.

Although young children can accurately determine that two rows contain the same number of coins when they are placed in a one-to-one correspondence, children younger than 7 years of age erroneously think that the longer row contains more coins when the coins in one of the rows are spread apart. To demonstrate that prefrontal inhibitory control is necessary to succeed at this task (Piaget's conservation-of-number task), we studied the relationship between the percentage of BOLD signal changes in the brain areas activated in this developmental task and behavioral performance on a Stroop task and a Backward Digit Span task. The level of activation in the right insula/inferior frontal gyrus was selectively related to inhibitory control efficiency (i.e., the Stroop task), whereas the activation in the left intraparietal sulcus (IPS) was selectively related to the ability to manipulate numerical information in working memory (i.e., the Backward Digit Span task). Taken together, the results indicate that to acquire number conservation, children's brains must not only activate the reversibility of cognitive operations (supported by the IPS) but also inhibit a misleading length-equal-number strategy (supported by the right insula/inferior frontal gyrus).

The shift from local to global visual processing in 6-year-old children is associated with grey matter loss.

BACKGROUND: A real-world visual scene consists of local elements (e.g. trees) that are arranged coherently into a global configuration (e.g. a forest). Children show psychological evolution from a preference for local visual information to an adult-like preference for global visual information, with the transition in visual preference occurring around 6 years of age. The brain regions involved in this shift in visual preference have not been described. METHODS AND RESULTS: We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to study children during this developmental window to investigate changes in gray matter that underlie the shift from a bias for local to global visual information. Six-year-old children were assigned to groups according to their judgment on a global/local task. The first group included children who still presented with local visual processing biases, and the second group included children who showed global visual processing biases. VBM results indicated that compared to children with local visual processing biases, children with global visual processing biases had a loss of gray matter in the right occipital and parietal visuospatial areas. CONCLUSIONS: These anatomical findings are in agreement with previous findings in children with neurodevelopmental disorders and represent the first structural identification of brain regions that allow healthy children to develop a global perception of the visual world.

Pedagogical effect of action on arithmetic performances in Wynn-like tasks solved by 2-year-olds.

Previous studies have provided evidence of interference due to a language-default mode (i.e., the singular/plural opposition) in 2-year-old children when solving arithmetic problems using a traditional onlooker method. However, an action-based method could help to bypass this language bias. In particular, when an arithmetic problem is presented to the children by the experimenter (onlooker mode) or realized by the children themselves (actor mode), performances are better with the latter. Thus, an experimental procedure based on "math in action" allows a brain-and-mind shift from a global language-bias (singular/plural) strategy to an exact numerical strategy. In this framework, we examined whether the exact numerical strategy induced by the actor method remains operational when children had to subsequently solve the same arithmetic problem using the traditional onlooker method. Results from 112 children suggest that this pedagogical effect of action bypasses the interference from language in onlooker mode after an initial confrontation of the problem in actor mode. This enduring embodiment effect has important implications for cognitive and preschool assessment in toddlers.

Which processes are involved in cognitive procedural learning?

Procedural memory is characterised by a relative resistance to pathology, making its assessment of the utmost importance. However, few studies have looked at the cognitive processes involved in cognitive procedural learning. In an initial experiment, we studied the role of different cognitive functions in massed cognitive procedural learning. Our results confirmed the existence of three separate learning phases and, for the first time, demonstrated the involvement of episodic memory and executive functions in the first learning phase. In a second experiment, we studied the effect of distributed learning conditions on the dynamics of procedural learning. This second study confirmed our results but showed that these conditions slow down the process of cognitive procedural learning. Our overall findings call into question the status of functionally autonomous memory system that is currently allotted to procedural memory, and suggest that the role of nonprocedural cognitive components should be taken into account in patient rehabilitation.