Search

Dans le cadre de cette étude expérimentale, nous sommes partis du principe que la différence trouvée par Kidd et Castano (2013) entre l’impact de la lecture d’une fiction populaire vs. littéraire sur la mesure d’empathie correspondait à une réalité. De plus, nous nous sommes intéressés aux résultats de Costa et son équipe selon lesquels la présentation d’un problème dans la langue seconde incite les participants à privilégier des réponses rationnelles ou logiques, bien plus que ne le fait la présentation dans la langue maternelle. Nous présentons ici les résultats de deux expériences que nous avons fait passer à des participants italiens et français. Pour tester nos hypothèses nous avons construit deux versions de la nouvelle de Camus, La femme adultère, l’une qui augmentait l’expression de la subjectivité dans le texte (version subjective), l’autre qui la réduisait (version objective). Nous avons soumis ces deux versions du texte de Camus à différents groupes de participants français et italiens et, après la lecture, nous leur avons demandé de passer une série d’items expérimentaux conçus à partir de la littérature critique. La lecture croisée des résultats de nos deux expériences nous amène à contater que, d’une part, la lecture d’un texte de fiction a un impact sur la mesure de l’empathie et que, d’autre part, le facteur langue maternelle vs. langue seconde a également une importance puisque l’impact de la lecture d’une fiction sur l’empathie n’est manifeste que lorsque le texte est lu dans la langue maternelle., Annali - Sezione Romanza, V. 62 N. 1 (2020): ANNALI - Sezione Romanza

Supplemental material, QJE-STD-19-420.R1-Supplementary_Material for The ratio processing system and its role in fraction understanding: Evidence from a match-to-sample task in children and adults with and without dyscalculia by Parnika Bhatia, Maël Delem, Jessica Léone, Esther Boisin, Anne Cheylus, Marie-Line Gardes and Jérôme Prado in Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology

In this experimental study, we assumed that the difference found by Kidd andCastano (2013) between the impacts in reading popular fiction vs. literature onmeasuring empathy corresponded to one reality. Moreover, we learnt from Costa andhis team that presenting a problem in a second language stimulates participants torational or logical responses much more than the same presentation in the nativelanguage. We present here the results of two experiments that we submitted toboth Italian and French participants. To test our hypotheses we constructed two versionsof Camus’s short story, The Adulterous Woman, the first one increased the expression ofsubjectivity in the text (subjective version), and the second one reduced it (objectiveversion). We presented these two versions of Camus’s text to different groups of Frenchand Italian participants and, after having read it, we asked them a series of experimentalitems designed from the critical literature reviewed. The reading of the two experiments’results show us that, on the one hand, reading a fictional text has an impact on themeasurement of empathy and that, on the other hand, the mother tongue factor vs.second language factor is very important because the impact of reading fiction onempathy is evident only when the text is read in the mother tongue., Dans le cadre de cette étude expérimentale, nous sommes partis du principe que ladifférence trouvée par Kidd et Castano (2013) entre l’impact de la lecture d’une fictionpopulaire vs. littéraire sur la mesure d’empathie correspondait à une réalité. De plus,nous avons acquis les résultats de Costa et son équipe selon lesquels la présentation d’unproblème dans la langue seconde incite les participants à privilégier des réponsesrationnelles ou logiques, bien plus que ne le fait la présentation dans la languematernelle. Nous présentons ici les résultats de deux expériences que nous avons faitpasser à des participants italiens et français. Pour tester nos hypothèses nous avonsconstruit deux versions de la nouvelle de Camus, La femme adultère, l’une qui augmen-tait l’expression de la subjectivité dans le texte (version subjective), l’autre qui la réduisait(version objective). Nous avons soumis ces deux versions du texte de Camus à dedifférentes groupes de participants français et italiens et, après la lecture, nous avonsdemandé de passer une série d’items expérimentaux conçus à partir de la littératurecritique prise en examen. La lecture croisée des résultats de nos deux expériences nousamène à contater que, d’une part, la lecture d’un texte de fiction a un impact surla mesure de l’empathie et que, d’autre part, le facteur langue maternelle vs. langue seconde a éga-lement une importance puisque l’impact de la lecture d’une fiction sur l’empathie n’estmanifeste que lorsque le texte est lu dans la langue maternelle.

International audience; The experimental literature on the pragmatic abilities of bilinguals is rather sparse. The only study investigating adult second language (L2) learners (Slabakova, 2010) found an increase of pragmatic responses in that population relative to monolinguals. The results of studies on early bilingual children are unclear, some finding a significant increase in pragmatic responses in early bilingual children (preschoolers) relative to monolinguals (Siegal et al., 2007), while another (Antoniou and Katsos, 2017), testing school children, does not. We tested adult French L2 learners of English and Spanish (in their two languages) as well as French monolingual controls in Experiment 1 and Italian-Slovenian early bilingual children (in both languages) and Slovenian monolingual controls in Experiment 2. Our results were similar to those of Antoniou and Katsos (2017) in early bilingual children, but different from those of Siegal et al. (2007) . We found no pragmatic bias in adult L2 leaners relative to adult monolinguals.

Using eye-tracking methodology, the current study investigates how people look at faces in the context of a social hierarchy. The first goal of the study was to characterize how participants distribute their attentional resources to a set of faces displayed on a vertical hierarchical scale including three social ranks (high, middle and low). In the first phase of the experiment, participants had to learn a hierarchy based on performance in competitive games. The participants’ rank, the other players’ rank, and the spatial orientation of the scale (highest social rank at the top of the vertical scale vs. highest social rank at the bottom) were manipulated. The results revealed that participants looked more at other players who occupy the highest than the lowest social rank but did not look more at another player who was ranked higher than lower than themselves when that player was in the middle position. Hence, participants were more sensitive to the highest vs. lowest rank contrast than to the higher vs. lower rank contrast. The results also revealed an influence of spatial orientation of the scale: less visual attention was allocated to the highest-ranking players when they appeared at the bottom than at the top of the spatial scale. The second goal of the study was to investigate how participants explored the face of each player. This was addressed in the second phase of the experiment, in which participants were presented with each player’s face individually. The results did not show any effect of players’ rank but revealed that in some circumstances, participants in the higher-ranking position were less likely to allocate visual resources to other players.

Research in cognitive neuroscience has shown that brain structures serving perceptual, emotional, and motor processes are also recruited during the understanding of language when it refers to emotion, perception, and action. However, the exact linguistic and extralinguistic conditions under which such language-induced activity in modality-specific cortex is triggered are not yet well understood. The purpose of this study is to introduce a simple experimental technique that allows for the online measure of language-induced activity in motor structures of the brain. This technique consists in the use of a grip force sensor that captures subtle grip force variations while participants listen to words and sentences. Since grip force reflects activity in motor brain structures, the continuous monitoring of force fluctuations provides a fine-grained estimation of motor activity across time. In other terms, this method allows for both localization of the source of language-induced activity to motor brain structures and high temporal resolution of the recorded data. To facilitate comparison of the data to be collected with this tool, we present two experiments that describe in detail the technical setup, the nature of the recorded data, and the analyses (including justification about the data filtering and artifact rejection) that we applied. We also discuss how the tool could be used in other domains of behavioral research.

L'invention concerne un dispositif (1) d'évaluation des capacités cognitives, comprenant: - un dispositif d'affichage (3) ; - un dispositif de test (2) configuré pour localiser l'emplacement du dispositif d'affichage fixé par un oeil du patient et effectuer automatiquement la séquence suivante: - l'affichage (3) d'un visuel de test ; - déterminer le nombre de transitions du regard entre une matrice et des propositions de réponse ; - répéter la séquence pour plusieurs visuels de test.

In an editorial commentary accompanying a recent study on the prevalence of apraxia in dementia patients [1], Bak emphasizes two facts: 1) research in cognitive neuroscience is contributing to increase the awareness of a close relationship between cognitive and motor functions and, by extension, cognitive and motor disorders in clinical populations; 2) despite so, the examination of motor functions in patients with cognitive disorders is not part of the routine clinical evaluation. Apraxia is a disorder in executing voluntary motor programming, in the absence of deficits in primary motor or sensory processes, comprehension of task instructions, object recognition or frontal inertia. Bak identifies apraxia as the critical disorder to address in routine clinical evaluation of patients with cognitive symptoms, as "it is exactly at the intersection between both [movement and cognition]". In Bak's view, a major obstacle to the improvement of clinical practice in this direction, is the absolute lack of tests for apraxia, practical and fast to use as part of routine evaluation. The Edinburgh Motor Assessment, in preparation by Bak and colleagues, is thus introduced as the first tool to respond to this urge. We could not agree more with the importance of considering apraxia in the routine clinical evaluation of cognitive functions in neurological patients, including those with dementia. Apraxia is indeed a cognitive deficit, affecting the higher-order mechanisms that govern purposeful motor production. However, if poverty or absence of tools is the problem, then we might not have a problem. Researchers have long since recognized apraxia as a cognitive disorder (with consequences on motor production). Moreover, efforts have been made to offer handy, standardized tests of praxis functions (e.g., the test TULIA [2]), based on models of apraxia, whose anatomo-functional correlates have been extensively studied in brain- damaged patients and in healthy individuals, with neuroimaging research. A problem with most previous tests, evaluating gesture recognition, identification and production in great detail, is the administration time, usually so long as to advise their use in a post-screening phase (i.e., after the patient received a diagnosis of apraxia). Addressing this problem, Tessari et al. [3] have developed STIMA (short test for ideomotor apraxia), a standardized test for an accurate but quick diagnosis of apraxia. The test, also usable for bedside screening, requires the patient to imitate 36 gestures that form eight subscales. The test and each individual subscale are accompanied by tables to correct raw-scores for age and education, and convert raw-scores into equivalent scores (useful for clinicians to estimate deficit severity) and percentiles (more often used for diagnosis in research). Different subscales test for different praxic impairments. In particular, STIMA emphasizes the distinctions between: 1) imitation errors indicative of cortical damage (e.g., sequence errors or unrecognizable gestures) versus subcortical damage (e.g., postural or timing errors); 2) producing distal (fingers/hand) versus proximal (arm) components of gesture; 3) producing known gestures, which recruits semantic structures in the left temporo-parietal cortex, versus producing novel gestures, which relies on a bilateral cortical network, to transform the visual input (the seen gesture) in a motor act. The evaluation of novel gestures is also crucial to detect praxis deficits in patients who can properly use objects and tools in their domestic context. Evaluation of praxis solely based on execution or reports of daily activities may leave those cases unnoticed. STIMA has been used and proven sensitive to apraxic deficits in patients with stroke [4], as well as neurodegenerative pathologies [5]. Our short (and non-exhaustive) overview of available standardized tests of apraxia shows a scenario brighter than the total absence of suitable tools depicted by Bak, and does justice to the numerous research teams in cognitive neuropsychology and neuroscience, who have paid more attention than Bak fears, to the clinical scopes of their activity and the constraints of the clinical setting (i.e., time pressure). Since the Edinburgh Motor Assessment by Bak et al. comes after recent and less recent attempts to provide clinicians with a fast and accurate test of apraxia, one may ask: do we really need this new tool? Perhaps, the Edinburgh Motor Assessment introduces features that make it more suitable to dementia patients, than other tests; or it relates to a model of apraxia, not represented in the other tests. Presenting the Edinburgh Motor Assessment as the first step toward an apraxia test for clinical practice precludes the possibility to clarify those or other potentially important aspects of that test. Considering its relation to extant tools rather appears as a good method to provide clear indications about which tool one (e.g., a clinician) should select in which case. This may help reducing the noise in the exchange between researchers and clinical practitioners as well as within our research field. References1. Ahmed S, Baker I, Thompson S et al. Utility of testing for apraxia and associated features in dementia. J Neurol Neurosurg Psychiatry 2016; doi:10.1136/jnnp-2015-3129452. Vanbellingen T, Kersten B, Van Hemelrijk B et al. Comprehensive assessment of gesture production: a new test of upper limb apraxia (TULIA). Eur J Neurol 2010;17:59-66.3. Tessari A, Toraldo A, Lunardelli A, et al. STIMA: a short screening test for ideo-motor apraxia, selective for action meaning and bodily district. Neurol Sci 2015;36: 977-984.4. Mengotti P, Corradi-Dell'Acqua C, Negri GA, et al. Selective imitation impairments differentially interact with language processing. Brain 2013;136:2602-26185. Papeo L, Cecchetto C, Mazzon G et al. The processing of actions and action-words in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis patients. Cortex 2015; 64:136-147.Conflict of Interest:None declared