Roger Fontaine

Metacognition and low achievement in mathematics: The effect of training in the use of metacognitive skills to solve mathematical word problems

The central question underlying this study was whether metacognition training could enhance the two metacognition components—knowledge and skills—and the mathematical problem-solving capacities of normal children in grade 3. We also investigated whether metacognitive training had a differential effect according to the childrens mathematics level. A total of 48 participants took part in this study, divided into an experimental and a control group, each subdivided into a lower and a normal achievers group. The training programme took an interactive approach in accordance with Schraws (1998) recommendation and was carried out over five training sessions. Results indicated that children in the training group had significantly higher post-test metacognitive knowledge, metacognitive skills, and mathematical problem-solving scores. In addition, metacognitive training was particularly beneficial to the low achievers. Thus metacognitive training enabled the low achievers to make progress and solve the same number of problems on the post-test as the normal achievers solved on the pre-test.

Bullying, sleep/wake patterns and subjective sleep disorders: Findings from a cross-sectional survey

The aim of this study was to explore: (a) sleep patterns and disorders possibly associated with adolescent bullying profiles (pure bully, pure victim, bully/victim and neutral) and (b) the effect of sleep on psychosocial problems (externalized and internalized) related to bullying. The sample consisted of 1422 students aged 10–18 (mean = 14.3, SD = 2.7; 57% male) from five socioeconomically diverse schools in France. Bullying profiles were obtained using the revised Bully–Victim Questionnaire. Subjective sleep disorders were assessed using the Athens Insomnia Scale. School-week and weekend sleep/wake patterns were recorded. Internalizing problems were investigated using a Perceived Social Disintegration Scale and a Psychological Distress Scale. Externalizing behaviors were assessed using a General Aggressiveness Scale and an Antisocial Behavior Scale. These questionnaires were administered during individual interviews at school. After controlling for effects of gender and age, victims of bullying showed significantly more subjective sleep disturbances than the pure-bully or neutral groups (p < 0.001). Bullies’ sleep schedules were more irregular (p < 0.001 for bedtime irregularity and p<0.01 for wake-up time irregularity) and their sleep duration was shorter than their schoolmates (p < 0.001 for the school week and p < 0.05 for the weekend). There was an effect of sleep on psychosocial problems related to bullying, and our results indicate that sleep has a moderating effect on aggression in bullies (p < 0.001). This would suggest a higher vulnerability of bullies to sleep deprivation. These results show differences in sleep problems and patterns in school-bullying profiles. Findings of this study open up new perspectives for understanding and preventing bullying in schools, with implications for research and clinical applications.

Aging and Encoding in Memory: False Alarms and Decision Criteria in a Word-Pair Recognition Task

Employing a false alarm recognition procedure with learning of highly associated word pairs, an experiment was conducted to examine the hypothesis of an age-related deficit in the distinctiveness of encoding. The evolution of the false alarm rate and of the C decision criteria was observed across three age groups, young adults, older adults, and older-older adults. The results show 1) no age differences on C decision criteria, indicating that the increase in FA with age is not related to a subject compensation strategy but is probably due to a failure in memory strength, and 2) that older respondents produced significantly more false alarms to distractors related to target items than the young respondents did but that they did not differ in their false alarm rate for unrelated distractors. This finding is interpreted as supporting the hypothesis of a failure with age to encode target items in a sufficiently elaborate or distinctive fashion. For the older-older respondents the data showed an increase in all false alarms indexes, suggesting that the encoding deficit gets worse in late adulthood.

Motor planning between 4 and 7 years of age: Changes linked to executive functions

In the present study, we adopted the conceptual frameworks of Miyake et al. (2000) (organization of executive functions) and Sergeant (2000) (linking executive function to motor behaviour) to assess developmental changes in executive functions and motor behaviour, using a planning task with a sample of 4-7-years old children. More precisely, the aim of the study was to characterize the development of motor response planning between the ages of 4 and 7 as a measure of the integration of multiple executive function processes, namely inhibition, shifting and working memory, and to gain insight into the concurrent developmental contributions of these processes. Participants were divided into two groups: group 1 was composed of 24 children aged 4-5 years and group 2 was composed of 20 children aged 6-7 years. Each participant took tests for shifting, inhibition, working memory and motor planning (the egg-planning task). Our results suggest that the egg-planning task requires the inhibition of a pre-potent but inappropriate response, and to a lesser extent the manipulation of working memory strategies. These results are discussed in relation to the development of each executive function component.

Judgment of blame in teenagers with Asperger's syndrome

ABSTRACT The judgment of blame was studied in a group of 28 teenagers, 14 with Asperger syndrome (AS) and 14 typically developed. Teenagers in each group were matched by age, cognitive development and academic level. They were presented with 12 short vignettes in which they had to judge an action according to the intent of the actor (deliberate and accidental), the consequences of the action (presence and absence) and the seriousness of the situation (low, medium and high). Results showed a significant difference in the patterns of judgment of both groups. The AS group judged the action according to the physical consequence of the action more than the intent of the actor; the opposite was observed with the control group. In addition, the AS teenagers were less capable than the control group of grading injury to a person when apportioning blame especially when they were not familiar with the social situations. This result suggests that the judgement of the seriousness of the outcome of the social interaction is linked with its level of familiarity. Furthermore, result are congruent with the assumption that two different cognitive structures, deontic reasoning and perspective taking, are involved in the judgment of blame.

Judgement of Blame in Alzheimer's Disease Sufferers

The algebraic structure of the blame schema of moral judgement (using Anderson’s method, Integration Information Theory) was studied in a group of 18 patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD) and a control group. The effects of Intent and Consequences of the action on the propensity to apportion blame were analysed, as well as the level of seriousness of different situations. Results show no significant differences between the AD and control groups in their algebraic structure, as they combine information about Intent and Consequence in the same way, but the AD group are less capable of taking seriousness into account when apportioning blame. The characteristics of the two cognitive processes that appear to be involved and their resistance to Alzheimer’s disease are discussed.

Peer violence, mental health and suicidal ideation in a sample of French adolescent

The aim of this study was to investigate the link between suicidal ideation, psychological morbidity and experiences with peer violence (victim or perpetrator) among adolescents. This study examined direct and indirect violence separately. A sample of 361 high school students from France completed a self-administered survey consisting of the Suicidal Ideation Questionnaire, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale and the General Health Questionnaire. Indirect peer victimization experienced by girls and direct peer victimization experienced by boys were more strongly linked to suicidal thoughts. Indirect aggression was also related to suicidal ideation among boys only. Indirect victimization at school was linked to a drop in self-esteem, a factor strongly related to the level of suicidal ideation, particularly for boys. These findings show that adolescent peer violence must be given particular attention in educational institutions due to its links not only with suicidal ideation, but also more broadly with students’ psychological distress.

Edge-induced illusory contours and visual detection: Subthreshold summation or spatial cueing?

Findings that illusory contours can facilitate visual detection of a subthreshold real line (Dresp & Bonnet, 1995) were not replicated, when line-induced instead of edge-induced illusory contour stimuli were used (Salvano-Pardieu et al., 2006). Rather, the results of the latter study supported the importance of spatial cues. The present study was designed to investigate whether spatial cueing might also facilitate detection of targets superimposed on edge-induced illusory contours. In Experiment 1, a target line was superimposed on the illusory contour of a Kanizsa square, presented between dots with a precise or distant location to the target, or on a homogeneous field (control). Detection of the target was poorest for the control, followed by the distant-dots and Kanizsa conditions, whereas it was best for precisely cueing dots. Experiment 2 replicated the conditions in Experiment 1 (Kanizsa, precisely cueing dots, and control) with additional controls for possible luminance effects. The two new conditions matched the Kanizsa condition for overall luminance and preciseness of spatial cueing without generating illusory contours. Performance was best in the dot condition and worst in the control, but the same across the Kanizsa and matched luminance conditions. In Experiments 3 and 4, the stimuli presented were matched more closely to those used by Dresp and Bonnet, but still the results confirmed those obtained in our Experiments 1 and 2. Together, these experiments strongly suggest that detection is also facilitated by spatial cueing rather than subthreshold summation, in the case of edge-induced illusory contours.

Aging and Categorization: Could Relevant Pieces of Information Reduce Older Persons' Inhibitory Deficit?

The goal of this study was to reduce the inhibitory deficit on the elderly by creating “optimizing conditions” in a categorization task. It was hypothesized that increasing the number of relevant pieces of information would reduce the difficulty associated with processing irrelevant information on a categorization task, since the number of relevant solutions to solve the problem would increase, while the total number of pieces of information to be processed would remain the same. This hypothesis was tested on 27 young adults and 30 elderly people using a task requiring the matching of a stimulus figure to one of the two response figures having one or more attributes in common with the stimulus. In line with previous findings, the results indicated an age-related inhibitory decline. However, consistent with the hypothesis, as the number of relevant attributes increased, the performance of elderly people improved and response times decreased, supporting the notion of latent cognitive resources.