Diego Shalom

Classical conditioning in the vegetative and minimally conscious state

Pavlovian trace conditioning depends on the temporal gap between the conditioned and unconditioned stimuli. It requires, in mammals, functional medial temporal lobe structures and, in humans, explicit knowledge of the temporal contingency. It is therefore considered to be a plausible objective test to assess awareness without relying on explicit reports. We found that individuals with disorders of consciousness (DOCs), despite being unable to report awareness explicitly, were able to learn this procedure. Learning was specific and showed an anticipatory electromyographic response to the aversive conditioning stimulus, which was substantially stronger than to the control stimulus and was augmented as the aversive stimulus approached. The amount of learning correlated with the degree of cortical atrophy and was a good indicator of recovery. None of these effects were observed in control subjects under the effect of anesthesia (propofol). Our results suggest that individuals with DOCs might have partially preserved conscious processing, which cannot be mediated by explicit reports and is not detected by behavioral assessment.

Far transfer to language and math of a short software-based gaming intervention

Significance Executive functions (EF) imply processes critical for purposeful, goal-directed behavior. In children, evidence derived from laboratory measures indicates that training can improve EF. However, this hypothesis has never been explicitly examined based on real-world measures, especially of educational achievement. Here, we investigate whether a set of computerized games might yield transfer on low-socioeconomic status otherwise typically developing 6-y-olds in an intervention deployed at their own school. The games elicit transfer of some EF, which cascades to real-world measures of school performance. More importantly, the intervention equalizes academic outcomes across children who regularly attend school and those who do not because of social and familiar circumstances. Executive functions (EF) in children can be trained, but it remains unknown whether training-related benefits elicit far transfer to real-life situations. Here, we investigate whether a set of computerized games might yield near and far transfer on an experimental and an active control group of low-SES otherwise typically developing 6-y-olds in a 3-mo pretest–training–posttest design that was ecologically deployed (at school). The intervention elicits transfer to some (but not all) facets of executive function. These changes cascade to real-world measures of school performance. The intervention equalizes academic outcomes across children who regularly attend school and those who do not because of social and familiar circumstances.

Eye movements during reading proverbs and regular sentences: the incoming word predictability effect

Reading is an everyday activity requiring the efficient integration of several central cognitive subsystems ranging from attention and oculomotor control to word identification and language comprehension. Effects of frequency, length and cloze predictability of words on reading times reliably indicate local processing difficulty of fixated words; also, a readers expectation about an upcoming word apparently influences fixation duration even before the eyes reach this word. Moreover, this effect has been reported as non-canonical (i.e., longer fixation durations on word N when word N+1 is of high cloze predictability). However, this effect is difficult to observe because in natural sentences the fluctuations in predictability in content words are very small. To overcome this difficulty we investigated eye movements while reading proverbs as well as sentences constructed for high- and low-average cloze predictability. We also determined for each sentence a word at which predictability of words jumps from a low to high value. Fixation durations while reading proverbs and high-predictable sentences exhibited significant effects of the change in predictability along the sentence (when the successive word is more predictable than the fixated word). Results are in agreement with the proposal that cloze predictability of upcoming words exerts an influence on fixation durations via memory retrieval.

Understanding inverse oxygenation responses during motor imagery: a functional near-infrared spectroscopy study.

Motor imagery (MI) is described as the mental rehearsal of voluntary movements. We used wireless functional near‐infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) recorded over secondary motor areas during performance of MI and motor execution (ME) in 11 healthy subjects, who either executed or imagined two drawing tasks differing in shape and frequency, i.e. simple (circle, 0.2 Hz) and complex (curved shape, 0.333 Hz). At the group level, results showed that fNIRS is capable of discriminating between the task mode, i.e. MI vs. ME, and the task complexity, i.e. simple vs. complex. At the single‐subject level, we observed inverse oxygenation responses, i.e. a decrease in Δ[O2Hb] and/or increase in Δ[HHb]. These inverse responses only occurred during MI tasks and were highly correlated, in the first place, with task mode, and secondly with task complexity. Inverse Δ[O2Hb] responses are likely to reflect individual differences in performance‐related signals and may contribute to the commonly observed inter‐subject variability in fNIRS measurements. As MI is now widely used as a mental task in neurorehabilitative applications, the resulting oxygenation pattern may be of use for future developments. For this programme to be successful it is crucial to determine the sources of inter‐subject variability. Our study presents a first effort in this direction, indicating that MI‐related inverse Δ[O2Hb] responses are correlated, first, with task mode and, secondly, with task complexity.

Choosing in Freedom or Forced to Choose? Introspective Blindness to Psychological Forcing in Stage-Magic

We investigated an individual ability to identify whether choices were made freely or forced by external parameters. We capitalized on magical setups where the notion of psychological forcing constitutes a well trodden path. In live stage magic, a magician guessed cards from spectators while inquiring how freely they thought they had made the choice. Our data showed a marked blindness in the introspection of free choice. Spectators assigned comparable ratings when choosing the card that the magician deliberately forced them compared to any other card, even in classical forcing, where the magician literally handles a card to the participant This observation was paralleled by a laboratory experiment where we observed modest changes in subjective reports by factors with drastic effect in choice. Pupil dilatation, which is known to tag slow cognitive events related to memory and attention, constitutes an efficient fingerprint to index subjective and objective aspects of choice.

Looking at Breakout: urgency and predictability direct eye events.

We investigated the organization of eye-movement classes in a natural and dynamical setup. To mimic the goals and objectives of the natural world in a controlled environment, we studied eye-movements while participants played Breakout, an old Atari game which remains surprisingly entertaining, often addictive, in spite of its graphic and structural simplicity. Our results show that eye-movement dynamics can be explained in terms of simple principles of moments of prediction and urgency of action. We observed a consistent anticipatory behavior (gaze was directed ahead of ball trajectory) except during the moment in which the ball bounced either in the walls, or in the paddle. At these moments, we observed a refractory period during which there are no blinks and saccades. Saccade delay caused the gaze to fall behind the ball. This pattern is consistent with a model by which participants postpone saccades at the bounces while predicting the ball trajectory and subsequently make a catch-up saccade directed to a position which anticipates ball trajectory. During bounces, trajectories were smooth and curved interpolating the V-shape function of the ball with minimal acceleration. These results pave the path to understand the taxonomy of eye-movements on natural configurations in which stimuli and goals switch dynamically in time.

Pupillary dynamics reveal computational cost in sentence planning

This study investigated the computational cost associated with grammatical planning in sentence production. We measured peoples pupillary responses as they produced spoken descriptions of depicted events. We manipulated the syntactic structure of the target by training subjects to use different types of sentences following a colour cue. The results showed higher increase in pupil size for the production of passive and object dislocated sentences than for active canonical subject–verb–object sentences, indicating that more cognitive effort is associated with more complex noncanonical thematic order. We also manipulated the time at which the cue that triggered structure-building processes was presented. Differential increase in pupil diameter for more complex sentences was shown to rise earlier as the colour cue was presented earlier, suggesting that the observed pupillary changes are due to differential demands in relatively independent structure-building processes during grammatical planning. Task-evoked pupillary responses provide a reliable measure to study the cognitive processes involved in sentence production.

Sea slugs, subliminal pictures, and vegetative state patients: boundaries of consciousness in classical conditioning.

Classical (trace) conditioning is a specific variant of associative learning in which a neutral stimulus leads to the subsequent prediction of an emotionally charged or noxious stimulus after a temporal gap. When conditioning is concurrent with a distraction task, only participants who can report the relationship (the contingency) between stimuli explicitly show associative learning. This suggests that consciousness is a prerequisite for trace conditioning. We review and question three main controversies concerning this view. Firstly, virtually all animals, even invertebrate sea slugs, show this type of learning; secondly, unconsciously perceived stimuli may elicit trace conditioning; and thirdly, some vegetative state patients show trace learning. We discuss and analyze these seemingly contradictory arguments to find the theoretical boundaries of consciousness in classical conditioning. We conclude that trace conditioning remains one of the best measures to test conscious processing in the absence of explicit reports.

Freedom and rules in human sequential performance: A refractory period in eye-hand coordination

In action sequences, the eyes and hands ought to be coordinated in precise ways. The mechanisms governing the architecture of encoding and action of several effectors remain unknown. Here we study hand and eye movements in a sequential task in which letters have to be typed while they move down through the screen. We observe a strict refractory period of about 200 ms between the initiation of manual and eye movements. Subjects do not initiate a saccade just after typing and do not type just after making the saccade. This refractory period is observed ubiquitously in every subject and in each step of the sequential task, even when keystrokes and saccades correspond to different items of the sequence-for instance when a subject types a letter that has been gazed at in a preceding fixation. These results extend classic findings of dual-task paradigms, of a bottleneck tightly locked to the response selection process, to unbounded serial routines. Interestingly, while the bottleneck is seemingly inevitable, better performing subjects can adopt a strategy to minimize the cost of the bottleneck, overlapping the refractory period with the encoding of the next item in the sequence.

Language, gesture, and judgment: Children’s paths to abstract geometry

As infants, children are sensitive to geometry when recognizing objects or navigating through rooms; however, explicit knowledge of geometry develops slowly and may be unstable even in adults. How can geometric concepts be both so accessible and so elusive? To examine how implicit and explicit geometric concepts develop, the current study assessed, in 132 children (3-8 years old) while they played a simple geometric judgment task, three distinctive channels: childrens choices during the game as well as the language and gestures they used to justify and accompany their choices. Results showed that, for certain geometric properties, children chose the correct card even if they could not express with words (or gestures) why they had made this choice. Furthermore, other geometric concepts were expressed and supported by gestures prior to their articulation in either choices or speech. These findings reveal that gestures and behavioral choices may reflect implicit knowledge and serve as a foundation for the development of geometric reasoning. Altogether, our results suggest that language alone might not be enough for expressing and organizing geometric concepts and that children pursue multiple paths to overcome its limitations, a finding with potential implications for primary education in mathematics.