0000000000146521
AUTHOR
Aurélia Bugaiska
Spotlight on the Survival Processing Advantage': An FNIRS Study on Adaptive Memory
International audience; In the present study, participants had to rate words for their relevance in an ancestral survival scenario (e.g., is bottle relevant in the fictious scenario of being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without basic supplies) and for their pleasantness (e.g., is bottle a pleasant word?). A distractor task lasting a few minutes followed and the participants were then tested on their recall of the words. We used fNIRS to bilaterally monitor the dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, known to be involved in strategic encoding) during the processing of verbal material in these two deep encoding situations. At the behavioral level, we replicated the survival pro…
Animacy effects in episodic memory: do imagery processes really play a role?
International audience; Animates are remembered better than inanimates because the former are ultimately more important for fitness than the latter. What, however, are the proximate mechanisms underpinning this effect? We focused on imagery processes as one proximate explanation. We tested whether animacy effects are related to the vividness of mental images (Study 1), or to the dynamic/motoric nature of mental images corresponding to animate words (Study 2). The findings showed that: (1) Animates are not estimated to be more vivid than inanimates; (2) The potentially more dynamic nature of the representations of animates does not seem to be a factor making animates more memorable than inan…
The positive effect of music on source memory
Several studies have investigated how to improve episodic memory performance by manipulating the factors that are crucial for successful encoding. There is an ongoing debate about whether a complex stimulus such as music can improve memory, and in particular memory for words, rather than interfere with correct encoding of information. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate whether verbal episodic memory can be improved by background context of instrumental music. Twenty young adults were asked to memorize different lists of words presented against a background of music, environmental sounds or silence. Their episodic memory performance was then tested in terms of item and source …
Analogical reasoning and aging: the processing speed and inhibition hypothesis.
This study was designed to investigate the effect of aging on analogical reasoning by manipulating the strength of semantic association (LowAssoc or HighAssoc) and the number of distracters' semantic analogies of the A:B::C:D type and to determine which factors might be responsible for the age-related differences on analogical reasoning by testing two different theoretical frameworks: the inhibition hypothesis and the speed mediation hypothesis. We compared young adults and two groups of aging people (old and old-old) with word analogies of the A:B::C:D format. Results indicate an age-related effect on analogical reasoning, this effect being greatest with LowAssoc analogies. It was not asso…
Normes d’associations verbales pour 520 mots concrets et étude de leurs relations avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques
Resume Cet article presente un nouvel ensemble de normes d’associations verbales pour 520 noms concrets du francais. Les normes d’associations verbales sont utiles pour l’etude des processus fondamentaux et representations en jeu dans les habiletes memorielles, de comprehension et production du langage. Les relations qu’entretiennent les normes d’associations verbales avec d’autres variables psycholinguistiques sont analysees. Aussi la stabilite des normes d’associations verbales a-t-elle ete etudiee sur un sous-ensemble de mots de l’etude de Ferrand et Alario (1998). Parmi les principaux resultats, il apparait que : 1. les items se repartissent en trois grands ensembles relativement distin…
The Influence of Music on Prefrontal Cortex during Episodic Encoding and Retrieval of Verbal Information: A Multichannel fNIRS Study.
Music can be thought of as a complex stimulus able to enrich the encoding of an event thus boosting its subsequent retrieval. However, several findings suggest that music can also interfere with memory performance. A better understanding of the behavioral and neural processes involved can substantially improve knowledge and shed new light on the most efficient music-based interventions. Based on fNIRS studies on music, episodic encoding, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (PFC), this work aims to extend previous findings by monitoring the entire lateral PFC during both encoding and retrieval of verbal material. Nineteen participants were asked to encode lists of words presented with eit…
Psycholinguistic norms for 320 fixed expressions (idioms and proverbs) in French
International audience; We provide psycholinguistic norms for a new set of 160 French idiomatic expressions and 160 proverbs: knowledge, predictability, literality, compositionality, subjective and objective frequency, familiarity, age of acquisition (AoA), and length. Different analyses (reliability, descriptive statistics, correlations) performed on the norms are reported and discussed. The norms can be downloaded as supplemental material.
Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?
International audience; The adaptive view of human memory (Nairne, 2010) assumes that animates (e.g., rabbit) are remembered better than inanimates (e.g., glass) because animates are ultimately more important for fitness than inanimates. Previous studies provided evidence for this view by showing that animates were recalled or recognized better than inanimates (e.g., Nairne, VanArsdall, Pandeirada, Cogdill, & LeBreton, 2013), but they did not assess memory for contextual details (e.g., where animates vs. inanimates occurred). In this study, we tested recollection of spatial information (Study 1) and temporal information (Study 2) associated with animate versus inanimate words. The findings …
Do healthy elders, like young adults, remember animates better than inanimates? An adaptive view
International audience; Background/Study Context: It has been found that young adults remember animates better than inanimates. According to the adaptive view of human memory, this is due to the fact that animates are more important for fitness purposes than inanimates. This effect has been ascribed to episodic memory, where older people exhibit difficulties. Methods: Here the authors investigated whether the animacy effect in memory also occurs for healthy older adults. Older and young adults categorized words for their animacy characteristics and were then given an unexpected recognition test on the words using the Remember/Know paradigm. Executive functions were also evaluated using seve…
The Stability-Plasticity Dilemma: Investigating the Continuum from Catastrophic Forgetting to Age-Limited Learning Effects
The stability-plasticity dilemma is a well-know constraint for artificial and biological neural systems. The basic idea is that learning in a parallel and distributed system requires plasticity for the integration of new knowledge, but also stability in order to prevent the forgetting of previous knowledge. Too much plasticity will result in previously encoded data being constantly forgotten, whereas too much stability will impede the efficient coding of this data at the level of the synapses. However, for the most part, neural computation has addressed the problems related to excessive plasticity or excessive stability as two different fields in the literature.
Mental imagery as a proximate explanation of the better remembering of living things over nonliving things
International audience
Recherche d'information dans les documents numériques : vers une variation des modalités d'exécution procédurale
National audience; L'objectif de la recherche présentée est de tester l'efficacité cognitive d'un nouveau système technique facilitant la recherche d'information dans les documents numériques. Ce système utilise un dispositif de prévisualisation par transparence permettant à l'utilisateur de consulter aisément des pages en profondeur. Une étude expérimentale a été conduite auprès de 36 participants, dont 26 étudiants et 10 personnes âgées. La tâche de recherche d'information consistait à trouver un appartement cible possédant un ou plusieurs critères spécifiques dans un site web d'agence immobilière spécialement conçu et contrôlé pour l'étude. Deux versions de ce site ont été testées. L'une…
Specific transfer effects following variable priority dual-task training in older adults
International audience; Purpose: Past divided attention training studies in older adults have suggested that variable priority training (VPT) tends to show larger improvement than fixed priority training (FPT). However, it remains unclear whether VPT leads to larger transfer effects. Methods: In this study, eighty-three older adults aged between 55 and 65 received five 1-hour sessions of VPT, FPT or of an active placebo. VPT and FPT subjects trained on a complex dual-task condition with variable stimulus timings in order to promote more flexible and self-guided strategies with regard to attentional priority devoted to the concurrent tasks. Real-time individualized feedback was provided to e…
Animacy effects in episodic memory : evidence for a stone-age memory
International audience
Age Differences in Learning from Instructional Animations
Summary: The present study tests the effects of the decline of executive functions and spatial abilities with aging on the comprehension of a complex instructional animation. An animation of a piano mechanism was presented individually to 33 young adults and 31 elderly participants. Two presentation speeds of the animation (normal and slow) were compared in a 2×2 experimental design. Eye movements were recorded during the learning time. Then, four executive function tests (inhibition, shifting, updating, and processing speed) and a spatial ability test (differential aptitude test) were undertaken by each participant. Results showed that the comprehension of animations was significantly affe…
QJE-STD_16-208.R2-Supplemental_Material – Supplemental material for Do animacy effects persist in memory for context?
Supplemental material, QJE-STD_16-208.R2-Supplemental_Material for Do animacy effects persist in memory for context? by Margaux Gelin, Patrick Bonin, Alain Méot and Aurélia Bugaiska in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology