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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.

To detect cognitive change after brain damage, it is important to know the level of premorbid intellectual functioning. A popular instrument in this context is the "Nederlandse Leestest voor Volwassenen" (NLV; Schmand et al., 1992). In this test, 50 words with irregular pronunciation must be read out loud. The score on this test used to be considered as a good estimate of someone's premorbid IQ, due to high correlations with the Verbal and Full-Scale IQ estimates of the WAIS (Verbal IQ: r = .85, Full Scale IQ: r = .74; Schmand et al., 1992). Despite some updates of the normative data (e.g., Bouma et al., 2012), the validity of the test has not been re-evaluated since. The aim of the current study was to evaluate whether the NLV still correlates sufficiently with the WAIS-IV to warrant its proper use as a psychodiagnostic tool. In Study 1, 30 participants (age range: 20-29 year) were tested, and in Study 2, 51 participants (age range: 45-65 year). We checked whether the NLV-generated IQ-score estimates correlated with the different IQ indices of the WAIS-IV. In the younger group, no correlations were found between the NLV-generated IQ-score estimate and any of the WAIS-IV indices nor the Full-Scale IQ. In the older group, the NLV-generated IQ-score estimate correlated with Full scale IQ and the indices of Verbal Comprehension, Working Memory and Processing Speed. These correlations were all <.46 which is far below the typically hold standard in test development of >.70. Based on these findings we conclude the NLV in its current form is not appropriate anymore to estimate premorbid IQ in both young and older adults., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2022 The Author(s).)

Coding serial order of information is a fundamental ability of our cognitive system, and still, little is known about its neural substrate. This study examined the neural substrates involved in the retrieval of information that is serially stored in verbal working memory task using a sensitive multivariate analysis approach. We compared neural activity for memorized items stemming from the beginning versus the end of a memory list assessing the degree of neural pattern discordance between order positions (beginning vs. end). The present results confirmed and refined the role of the intraparietal sulcus in the processing of serial order information in working memory. An important finding is that the hippocampus showed sensitivity to serial order information. Our results indicate that the representation of serial order information relies on a broader set of neural areas and highlight the role of the intraparietal sulcus and the hippocampus, in addition to the supramarginal gyrus and the SMA. The contribution of different neural regions might reflect the involvement of distinct levels of serial order coding (i.e., spatial, attentional, temporal) that support the representation of serial order information., (© 2022 Massachusetts Institute of Technology.)

Theoretical models explaining serial order processing link order information to specified position markers. However, the precise characteristics of position marking have remained largely elusive. Recent studies have shown that space is involved in marking serial position of items in verbal working memory (WM). Furthermore, it has been suggested, but not proven, that accessing these items involves horizontal shifts of spatial attention. We used continuous electroencephalography recordings to show that memory search in serial order verbal WM involves spatial attention processes that share the same electrophysiological signatures as those operating on the visuospatial WM and external space. Accessing an item from a sequence in verbal WM induced posterior "early directing attention negativity" and "anterior directing attention negativity" contralateral to the position of the item in mental space (i.e., begin items on the left; end items on the right). In the frequency domain, we observed posterior alpha suppression contralateral to the position of the item. Our results provide clear evidence for the involvement of spatial attention in retrieving serial information from verbal WM. Implications for WM models are discussed., (© The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permission@oup.com.)

Cognitive control research is concerned with the question how we install adaptive behaviour in the case of (cognitive) conflict. In this review we focus on the role that awareness of this conflict plays in our ability to exert cognitive control. We will argue that visual conflict is not the only building block of metacognitive experiences of conflict and discuss how they are related to cognitive control. So, a first aim of the current review is to understand how these different metacognitive judgements are created. To do so, we draw some remarkable parallels with research on metacognition in decision making and memory research. Next, we elaborate on the relationship between metacognition and adaptive behaviour, with a specific focus on the role of subjective experiences in the Gratton effect. The grey areas that persist in the current literature are highlighted. In addition to deciphering the mechanisms of metacognitive judgements in cognitive control, this overview also aims to further enlarge our understanding of metacognitive abilities at a more general level., Competing Interests: The authors have no competing interests to declare., (Copyright: © 2021 The Author(s).)

Number-space associations are a robust observation, but their underlying mechanisms remain debated. Two major accounts have been identified. First, spatial codes may constitute an intrinsic part of number representations stored in the brain - a perspective most commonly referred to as the Mental Number Line account. Second, spatial codes may be generated at the level of working memory when number (or other) representations are coordinated in function of a specific task. The aim of the current paper is twofold. First, whereas a pure Mental Number Line account cannot capture the complexity of observations reported in the literature, we here explore if and how a pure working memory account can suffice. Second, we make explicit (more than in our earlier work) the potential building blocks of such a working memory account, thereby providing clear and concrete foci for empirical efforts to test the feasibility of the account.

Most general theories on serial order working memory (WM) assume the existence of position markers that are bound to the to-be-remembered items to keep track of the serial order. So far, the exact cognitive/neural characteristics of these markers have remained largely underspecified, while direct empirical evidence for their existence is mostly lacking. In the current study we demonstrate that retrieval from verbal serial order WM can be facilitated or hindered by spatial cuing: begin elements of a verbal WM sequence are retrieved faster after cuing the left side of space, while end elements are retrieved faster after cuing the right side of space. In direct complement to our previous work--where we showed the reversed impact of WM retrieval on spatial processing--we argue that the current findings provide us with a crucial piece of evidence suggesting a direct and functional involvement of space in verbal serial order WM. We outline the idea that serial order in verbal WM is coded within a spatial coordinate system with spatial attention being involved when searching through WM, and we discuss how this account can explain several hallmark observations related to serial order WM.

Various prominent models on serial order coding in working memory (WM) build on the notion that serial order is achieved by binding the various items to-be-maintained to fixed position markers. Despite being relatively successful in accounting for empirical observations and some recent neuro-imaging support, these models were largely formulated on theoretical grounds and few specifications have been provided with respect to the cognitive and/or neural nature of these position markers. Here we outline a hypothesis on a novel candidate mechanism to substantiate the notion of serial position markers. Specifically, we propose that serial order WM is grounded in the spatial attention system: (I) The position markers that provide multi-item WM with a serial context should be understood as coordinates within an internal, spatially defined system; (II) internal spatial attention is involved in searching through the resulting serial order representation; and (III) retrieval corresponds to selection by spatial attention. We sketch the available empirical support and discuss how the hypothesis may provide a parsimonious framework from which to understand a broad range of observations across behavioral, neural and neuropsychological domains. Finally, we pinpoint what we believe are major questions for future research inspired by the hypothesis.

It is generally accepted that the mental representation of numerical magnitude consists of a spatial "mental number line" (MNL) with smaller quantities on the left and larger quantities on the right. However, the amount of dissociations between tasks that were believed to tap onto this representational medium is accumulating, questioning the universality of this model. The aim of the present study was to unravel the functional relationship between the different tasks and effects that are typically used as evidence for the MNL. For this purpose, a group of right brain damaged patients (with and without neglect) and healthy controls were subjected to physical line bisection, number interval bisection, parity judgment, and magnitude comparison. Using principal component analysis, different orthogonal components were extracted. We discuss how this component structure captures the dissociations reported in the literature and how it can be considered as a first step toward a new unitary framework for understanding the relation between numbers and space.