Marie Izaute

The effect of feedback on timing in children and adults: The temporal generalization task

Children aged 5 and 8 years and adults were tested on a temporal generalization task with a standard duration of 600 ms in a condition with or without corrective feedback. In all conditions, the participants produced orderly temporal generalization gradients, although these were flatter in the younger children, especially in the no-feedback condition. Nevertheless, the results show that the feedback increased the steepness of the generalization gradient in all age groups and in a greater extent in the younger children. Our clock-based model suggested that feedback reduces the variability of the memory representation of the standard duration but also the probability of random responses in the 5-year-olds.

Specific effects of an amnesic drug: effect of lorazepam on study time allocation and on judgment of learning.

We investigated the effects of lorazepam, a benzodiazepine, on the allocation of study time, memory, and judgment of learning, in a cognitive task where the repetition of word presentation was manipulated. The aim was to assess whether lorazepam would affect the learning processes and/or whether the participants would be aware of the amnesic difficulty. A total of 30 healthy volunteers participated in the study, 15 of whom received a capsule containing the lorazepam drug (0.038 mg/kg) and 15 a placebo capsule. First, the accuracy of delayed judgments of learning (JOL) was measured in both groups. For the JOL ratings, results showed that all the participants benefited from word repetition. Although the overall performance was lower in the lorazepam than in the placebo group, the accuracy of the JOL ratings was preserved by the drug. Second, all the participants benefited from the repetition of learning, although the performances of the lorazepam-treated subjects remained lower than those of the placebo participants. The repetition of learning had an effect on JOL in both groups. Finally, the time spent learning each (allocation study time) pair of words was measured. For the placebo group, results revealed that study time decreased significantly with the frequency of presentation. For the lorazepam group, no effect of presentation frequency was found. Overall, our findings suggest that the lorazepam drug has a differential effect on the monitoring and the control processes involved in a learning task. The implications of these findings are discussed within the theoretical framework of metacognition.

Perceived social support and locus of control after a traumatic brain injury (TBI)

Research design: The aim of the study was to investigate the social rehabilitation related to the perceived social support and the locus of control (LC) of patients with traumatic brain injury (TBI). Methods and procedures: A group of 46 patients 3–5 years after injury was evaluated. For the social rehabilitation, patients were categorized as ‘high rehabilitation’ or ‘low rehabilitation’ as regards vocational rehabilitation. Low rehabilitation patients should confirm the idea of an external locus of control more than high rehabilitation patients. Main outcomes and results: As far as perceived social support is concerned, both groups reported a poor level of social support, although the patients considered as high rehabilitation exhibited greater satisfaction in terms of social support. When one considers LC, patients with TBI were associated with a weaker internal LC than non-patients with TBI. In patients exhibiting a high level of rehabilitation, the LC was less frequently attributed to ‘chance’ or ‘powerful others’. Patients with a low level of rehabilitation explained their difficulties in terms of external factors. Conclusions: It is therefore necessary to take rehabilitation, perceived high-quality social support and low external LC into account if one is to improve the rehabilitation of TBI patients.

Metacognitive Questionnaire on Time : Feeling of the passage of time

The aim of our studies was to design a Metacognitive Questionnaire on Time (MQT) that assesses inter-individual variations in the awareness of factors affecting the experience of the passage of time. In the first study, 532 young adults were asked to reply to an initial questionnaire consisting of 106 questions relating to many different factors (e.g., psychostimulant, body temperature, age, attention) that could affect how time is perceived. Factorial analyses allowed us to extract two discriminant factors, one relating to attention and the other to emotion. The second study sought to validate the final 24-item questionnaire by gathering data from 212 university students. Confirmatory Factorial Analyses (AMOS) showed that the MQT has the same two-factor structure. The third study assessed the construct validity of the MQT by measuring the correlation between the MQT scores and the scores with other questionnaires measuring close or different constructs. In sum, these studies enabled us to develop an easy-to-use questionnaire whereby it is possible to distinguish between individuals according to their subjective feeling of the passage of time. In addition, the participants’ responses on the MQT showed that they were more aware of attention-related factors than of emotion-related factors that might produce time distortions, and that women were more aware of their own temporal distortions than men.

Dissociation between the cognitive process and the phenomenological experience of TOT: effect of the anxiolytic drug lorazepam on TOT states.

TOT states may be viewed as a temporary and reversible microamnesia. We investigated the effects of lorazepam on TOT states in response to general knowledge questions. The lorazepam participants produced more commission errors and more TOTs following commission errors than the placebo participants (although the rates did not change). The resolution of the TOTs was unimpaired by the drug. Neither feeling-of-knowing accuracy nor recognition were affected by lorazepam. The higher level of incorrect recalls produced by lorazepam participants may be due to the fact that they were more frequently temporarily unable to access a known item. For some of these items, the awareness of the retrieval failure resulted in a commission TOT (phenonemological TOT after a commission error). The resolution of the TOT conflict is discussed in the light of the anxiolytic and anticonflict effects of lorazepam. The data are discussed in terms of contemporary theories of TOTs and the effects that benzodiazepines have on semantic memory.

The conscious awareness of time distortions regulates the effect of emotion on the perception of time.

This study examined how the awareness of emotion-related time distortions modifies the effect of emotion on time perception. Before performing a temporal bisection task with stimulus durations presented in the form of neutral or emotional facial expressions (angry, disgusted and ashamed faces), some of the participants read a scientific text providing either correct or incorrect information on the emotion-time relationship. Other participants did not receive any information. The results showed that the declarative knowledge allowed the participants to regulate (decrease) the intensity of emotional effects on the perception of time, but did not trigger temporal effects when the emotional stimuli did not automatically induce emotional reactions that distorted time.

Metacognition Triggered by a Social Aspect of Expertise

The main goal of this study was to show how the social dimension of academic expertise affects cognitive and metacognitive activities in the context of speaking English as a foreign language. Two studies are reported in which pairs of French students interacted in English. The first study showed that students randomly said to be experts in English performed better than students said to be nonexperts. The second study replicated this effect, but showed that it was slightly modulated by the students’ actual expertise in English. This research clearly supports the claim that in communicative interaction, what individuals are told about their own and their partner’s expertise along a comparative dimension (here, English proficiency) is a determinant of the quantity and quality of their performance. A fictitious expert position, for example, has the power to promote metacognitive activity. These studies suggest that academic performance should be investigated not only from a cognitive and didactic standpoint, but also in terms of the social aspects of academic expertise.

Retrieval of names in face and object naming in an interference study

Two experiments using the interference paradigm are reported. In the first experiment, the participants spoke aloud the names of celebrities and the names of objects when presented with pictures while hearing distractors. In the case of proper names, we replicated the data obtained by Izaute and Bonin (2001) using the interference paradigm with a proper name written naming task. In the case of common names, the results replicated those obtained by Shriefers, Meyer, and Levelt (1990). In the second experiment, the participants produced the names of celebrities when presented with their faces while hearing distractors that were either proper names associated with the celebrities (associate condition), that belonged to a different professional category (different condition), or that corresponded to the proper names of the celebrities (identical condition). For negative SOAs, “associate” distractors were found to increase latencies compared to the “different category” condition. The implications of the findings for proper name retrieval are briefly discussed.

Metamemory in Schizophrenia: Monitoring or Control Deficit?

Schizophrenia is a common mental disease with a lifetime risk of about 1%. It has been closely linked to a wide range of cognitive deficits. In addition to cognitive deficits, patients with schizophrenia also manifest deficits in awareness of their memory capacity. The study of metamemory permits an experimental approach to metacognition in schizophrenia. Two studies with schizophrenia patients are reported. The first study is on FOK, a metamemory judgment that is expressed at the time of retrieval. The second study examines JOL, which is expressed at the time of learning and allows the studying of the strategic regulation of learning. Thus, the relationship between monitoring and control can be revealed. The findings of the two reported studies showed preservation of the accuracy of prospective metamemory judgments in schizophrenia. The first study demonstrated that the accuracy of FOK, the judgments elicited at the time of retrieval regarding the future recallability of unrecalled items, is preserved in an episodic task. Evidence from the second study indicates that the accuracy of judgments elicited at the time of encoding (i.e., JOLs) is also relatively preserved but the strategic regulation (i.e., control) of study time is impaired in schizophrenia.

Differential effects of visual uncertainty and contextual guidance on perceptual decisions: Evidence from eye and mouse tracking in visual search.

Visual search can be seen as a decision-making process that aims to assess whether a target is present or absent from a scene. In this perspective, eye movements collect evidence related to target detection and verification to guide the decision. We investigated whether, in real-world scenes, target detection and verification are differentially recruited in the decision-making process in the presence of prior information (expectations about target location) and perceptual uncertainty (noise). We used a mouse-tracking methodology with which mouse trajectories unveil components of decision-making and eye-tracking measures reflect target detection and verification. Indoor scenes were presented, including a target in usual or unusual locations or no target, and were degraded with additive noise (or no noise). Participants had to respond to the targets presence or absence. Degrading the scene delayed the decision due to increased verification times and reduced mouse velocity. Targets in unusual locations delayed the decision and deviated mouse trajectories toward the target-absent response. Detection times played a major role in these effects. Thus, target detection and verification processes influence decision-making by integrating the available sources of information differently and lead to an accumulation of evidence toward both the presence of a target and its absence.