Perirhinal cortex is associated with fine-grained discrimination of conceptually confusable objects in Alzheimer's disease.

The perirhinal cortex (PrC) stands among the first brain areas to deteriorate in Alzheimer's disease (AD). This study tests to what extent the PrC is involved in representing and discriminating confusable objects based on the conjunction of their perceptual and conceptual features. To this aim, AD patients and control counterparts performed 3 tasks: a naming, a recognition memory, and a conceptual matching task, where we manipulated conceptual and perceptual confusability.

The respective contribution of cognitive control and working memory to semantic and subjective organization in aging.

Organizing information is beneficial to episodic memory performance. Among several possible organizational strategies, two consist of organizing the information in semantic clusters (semantic organization) or self-organizing the information based on new associations that do not exist in semantic memory (subjective organization). Here, we investigated in a single study how these two organizational behaviors were underlined by different controlled processes and whether these relations were subjected to age-related differences.

The protective effect of educational level varies as a function of the difficulty of the memory task in ageing.

Unlabelled: This study aimed to explore the effects of age and educational level on recall performance and organisational strategies used during recall as a function of the level of memory task difficulty. Younger ( = 55, age range = 20-39 years) and older ( = 45, age range = 65-75 years) adults learned a word list where the words were either already semantically grouped (easier) or presented in pseudo-random order (harder), and then recalled the words. The number of words recalled was calculated, and an index of clustering was computed to assess organisational strategies.

Understanding autonomous behaviour development: Exploring the developmental contributions of context-tracking and task selection to self-directed cognitive control.

Gaining autonomy is a key aspect of growing up and cognitive control development across childhood. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in an autonomous (or self-directed) fashion. Here, we propose that in order to successfully engage self-directed control, children identify, and achieve goals by tracking contextual information and using this information to select relevant tasks.

Carry-over effects of tool functionality and previous unsuccessfulness increase overimitation in children.

Children 'overimitate' causally irrelevant actions in experiments where both irrelevant and relevant actions involve a single common tool. This study design may make it harder for children to recognize the irrelevant actions, as the perceived functionality of the tool during the demonstration of the relevant action may be carried over to the irrelevant action, potentially increasing overimitation. Moreover, little is known how overimitation is affected by the demonstrator's expressed emotions and the child's prior success with the task.

Disentangling the Respective Contribution of Task Selection and Task Execution to Self-Directed Cognitive Control Development.

Task selection and task execution are key constructs in cognitive control development. Yet, little is known about how separable they are and how each contributes to task switching performance. Here, 60 4- to 5-year olds, 60 7- to 8-year olds, and 60 10- to 11-year olds children completed the double registration procedure, which dissociates these two processes.

Spontaneous categorization of tools based on observation in children and chimpanzees.

The acquisition of the concept of 'tool' remains intriguing from both developmental and comparative perspectives. Our current model of tool use development in children is based on humans' supposedly unique ability to adopt a teleological stance: the understanding of a demonstrator's goal-based intentions when using a tool. It is however unclear how children and chimpanzees, our closest relatives, combine their knowledge of different objects whose function is to act on other parts of the environment, and assign them to a single category of 'tools'.

Voluntary task switching in children: Switching more reduces the cost of task selection.

Emerging cognitive control supports increasingly efficient goal-directed behaviors. With age, children are increasingly expected to decide autonomously and with little external aid which goals to attain. However, little is known about how children engage cognitive control in such a self-directed fashion.

Evidence for a sex effect during overimitation: boys copy irrelevant modelled actions more than girls across cultures.

Children are skilful at acquiring tool-using skills by faithfully copying relevant and irrelevant actions performed by others, but poor at innovating tools to solve problems. Five- to twelve-year-old urban French and rural Serbian children ( = 208) were exposed to a ; a jar containing a reward in a bucket and a pipe cleaner as potential recovering tool material. In both countries, few children under the age of 10 made a hook from the pipe cleaner to retrieve the reward on their own.

Group Membership Influences More Social Identification Than Social Learning or Overimitation in Children.

Group membership is a strong driver of everyday life in humans, influencing similarity judgments, trust choices, and learning processes. However, its ontogenetic development remains to be understood. This study investigated how group membership, age, sex, and identification with a team influenced 39- to 60-month-old children (N = 94) in a series of similarity, trust, and learning tasks.