Olivier Houdé

Cortical networks for working memory and executive functions sustain the conscious resting state in man

The cortical anatomy of the conscious resting state (REST) was investigated using a meta-analysis of nine positron emission tomography (PET) activation protocols that dealt with different cognitive tasks but shared REST as a common control state. During REST, subjects were in darkness and silence, and were instructed to relax, refrain from moving, and avoid systematic thoughts. Each protocol contrasted REST to a different cognitive task consisting either of language, mental imagery, mental calculation, reasoning, finger movement, or spatial working memory, using either auditory, visual or no stimulus delivery, and requiring either vocal, motor or no output. A total of 63 subjects and 370 spatially normalized PET scans were entered in the meta-analysis. Conjunction analysis revealed a network of brain areas jointly activated during conscious REST as compared to the nine cognitive tasks, including the bilateral angular gyrus, the left anterior precuneus and posterior cingulate cortex, the left medial frontal and anterior cingulate cortex, the left superior and medial frontal sulcus, and the left inferior frontal cortex. These results suggest that brain activity during conscious REST is sustained by a large scale network of heteromodal associative parietal and frontal cortical areas, that can be further hierarchically organized in an episodic working memory parieto-frontal network, driven in part by emotions, working under the supervision of an executive left prefrontal network.

Mapping numerical processing, reading, and executive functions in the developing brain: an fMRI meta‐analysis of 52 studies including 842 children

Tracing the connections from brain functions to childrens cognitive development and education is a major goal of modern neuroscience. We performed the first meta-analysis of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data obtained over the past decade (1999-2008) on more than 800 children and adolescents in three core systems of cognitive development and school learning: numerical abilities, reading, and executive functions (i.e. cognitive control). We ran Activation Likelihood Estimation (ALE) meta-analyses to obtain regions of reliable activity across all the studies. The results indicate that, unlike results usually reported for adults, children primarily engage the frontal cortex when solving numerical tasks. With age, there may be a shift from reliance on the frontal cortex to reliance on the parietal cortex. In contrast, the frontal, temporo-parietal and occipito-temporal regions at work during reading in children are very similar to those reported in adults. The executive frontal regions are also consistent with the imaging literature on cognitive control in adults, but the developmental comparison between children and adolescents demonstrates a key role of the anterior insular cortex (AIC) with an additional right AIC involvement in adolescents.

Shifting from the Perceptual Brain to the Logical Brain: The Neural Impact of Cognitive Inhibition Training

What happens in the human brain when the mind has to inhibit a perceptual process in order to activate a logical reasoning process? Here, we use functional imaging to show the networks of brain areas involved in a deductive logic task performed twice by the same subjects, first with a perceptual bias and then with a logical response following bias-inhibition training. The main finding is a striking shift in the cortical anatomy of reasoning from the posterior part of the brain (the ventral and dorsal pathways) to a left-prefrontal network including the middle-frontal gyrus, Brocas area, the anterior insula, and the pre-SMA. This result indicates that such brain shifting is an essential element for human access to logical thinking.

Inhibition and cognitive development: object, number, categorization, and reasoning

Abstract In the early 1990s, the concept of inhibition sparked a new surge of interest in cognitive psychology, both in North America and in Europe. In the framework of that research trend, it is proposed here that cognitive development cannot be reduced to the coordination–activation of structural units (as in Jean Piagets structuralist theory and in the neo-structuralist models), but that development also often involves inhibiting a competing structure or scheme. This approach, which views the processes of selection–inhibition as age- and domain-specific, is illustrated by four experimental examples (from infancy to adulthood): object construction, number, categorization, and reasoning.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Piaget's Conservation-of-Number Task in Preschool and School-Age Children: A Neo-Piagetian Approach.

Jean Piagets theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in childrens thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to number conservation. In the current study, preschool children (nonconservers, 5-6 years of age) and school-age children (conservers, 9-10 years of age) were presented with Piagets conservation-of-number task and monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The cognitive change allowing children to access conservation was shown to be related to the neural contribution of a bilateral parietofrontal network involved in numerical and executive functions. These fMRI results highlight how the behavioral and cognitive stages Piaget formulated during the 20th century manifest in the brain with age.

First insights on neuropedagogy of reasoning

As stated by Jean-Pierre Changeux (2004) in his last book, The Physiology of Truth, objective knowledge does exist, and our brains are naturally equipped to recognise it. The results presented here provide the first insights on (1) the cerebral basis of reasoning errors, and (2) the neurocognitive dynamics that lead the human brain towards logical truth. We propose to call this new approach “neuropedagogy of reasoning”.

The Shift from Local to Global Visual Processing in 6-Year-Old Children Is Associated with Grey Matter Loss

Background A real-world visual scene consists of local elements (e.g. trees) that are arranged coherently into a global configuration (e.g. a forest). Children show psychological evolution from a preference for local visual information to an adult-like preference for global visual information, with the transition in visual preference occurring around 6 years of age. The brain regions involved in this shift in visual preference have not been described. Methods and Results We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to study children during this developmental window to investigate changes in gray matter that underlie the shift from a bias for local to global visual information. Six-year-old children were assigned to groups according to their judgment on a global/local task. The first group included children who still presented with local visual processing biases, and the second group included children who showed global visual processing biases. VBM results indicated that compared to children with local visual processing biases, children with global visual processing biases had a loss of gray matter in the right occipital and parietal visuospatial areas. Conclusions These anatomical findings are in agreement with previous findings in children with neurodevelopmental disorders and represent the first structural identification of brain regions that allow healthy children to develop a global perception of the visual world.

Developmental changes of win-stay and loss-shift strategies in decision making

This study aims to clarify the developmental changes in real-life decision making when strategy is adjusted using both positive and negative feedback, that is, whether strategic adjustment evolves with age. A total of 84 participants divided into three age groups (children, adolescents, and adults) performed the standard version of the Iowa Gambling Task (IGT). Children and adolescents showed a strong bias in favor of disadvantageous choices whereas adults learned to decide advantageously during the course of the task. Interestingly, the results clearly demonstrate that children did not switch differently following gains and losses whereas adolescents and adults switched more often after a loss than after a gain, corresponding to the “loss-shift” and the “win-stay” strategies, respectively. The results also revealed that adults switched less often after losses compared to children and adolescents and, thus, used the loss-stay strategy more often than the 2 youngest groups. These new findings suggest that successful completion of the IGT by adults requires fine feedback monitoring and more frequent use of the win-stay and loss-stay strategic adjustments.

Negative Priming in a Numerical Piaget-like Task as Evidenced by ERP

Inhibition is a key executive function in adults and children for the acquisition and expression of cognitive abilities. Using event-related potentials in a priming adaptation of a Piaget-like numerical task taken from developmental psychology, we report a negative priming effect in adults measured just after the cognitive inhibition of a misleading strategy, the visuospatial length-equals-number bias. This effect was determined in the N200 information processing stage through increased N200 amplitude. We show here that for accuracy in numerical quantification, the adult brain still had to control the childlike cognition biases that are stored in a kind of developmental memory.

Measuring inhibitory control in children and adults: brain imaging and mental chronometry.

Jean Piaget underestimated the cognitive capabilities of infants, preschoolers, and elementary schoolchildren, and overestimated the capabilities of adolescents and even adults which are often biased by illogical intuitions and overlearned strategies (i.e., “fast thinking” in Daniel Kahneman’s words). The crucial question is now to understand why, despite rich precocious knowledge about physical and mathematical principles observed over the last three decades in infants and young children, older children, adolescents and even adults are nevertheless so often bad reasoners. We propose that inhibition of less sophisticated solutions (or heuristics) by the prefrontal cortex is a domain-general executive ability that supports children’s conceptual insights associated with more advanced Piagetian stages, such as number-conservation and class inclusion. Moreover, this executive ability remains critical throughout the whole life and even adults may sometimes need “prefrontal pedagogy” in order to learn inhibiting intuitive heuristics (or biases) in deductive reasoning tasks. Here we highlight some of the discoveries from our lab in the field of cognitive development relying on two methodologies used for measuring inhibitory control: brain imaging and mental chronometry (i.e., the negative priming paradigm). We also show that this new approach opens an avenue for re-examining persistent errors in standard classroom-learning tasks.