Infants' Social Evaluation of Helpers and Hinderers: A Large-Scale, Multi-Lab, Coordinated Replication Study.

Evaluating whether someone's behavior is praiseworthy or blameworthy is a fundamental human trait. A seminal study by Hamlin and colleagues in 2007 suggested that the ability to form social evaluations based on third-party interactions emerges within the first year of life: infants preferred a character who helped, over hindered, another who tried but failed to climb a hill. This sparked a new line of inquiry into the origins of social evaluations; however, replication attempts have yielded mixed results.

Speech-derived haptic stimulation enhances speech recognition in a multi-talker background.

Speech understanding, while effortless in quiet conditions, is challenging in noisy environments. Previous studies have revealed that a feasible approach to supplement speech-in-noise (SiN) perception consists in presenting speech-derived signals as haptic input. In the current study, we investigated whether the presentation of a vibrotactile signal derived from the speech temporal envelope can improve SiN intelligibility in a multi-talker background for untrained, normal-hearing listeners.

What determines the neural response to snakes in the infant brain? A systematic comparison of color and grayscale stimuli.

Snakes and primates have coexisted for thousands of years. Given that snakes are the first of the major primate predators, natural selection may have favored primates whose snake detection abilities allowed for better defensive behavior. Aligning with this idea, we recently provided evidence for an inborn mechanism anchored in the human brain that promptly detects snakes, based on their characteristic visual features.

Neurodevelopmental oscillatory basis of speech processing in noise.

Humans' extraordinary ability to understand speech in noise relies on multiple processes that develop with age. Using magnetoencephalography (MEG), we characterize the underlying neuromaturational basis by quantifying how cortical oscillations in 144 participants (aged 5-27 years) track phrasal and syllabic structures in connected speech mixed with different types of noise. While the extraction of prosodic cues from clear speech was stable during development, its maintenance in a multi-talker background matured rapidly up to age 9 and was associated with speech comprehension.

Cortical tracking of lexical speech units in a multi-talker background is immature in school-aged children.

Children have more difficulty perceiving speech in noise than adults. Whether this difficulty relates to an immature processing of prosodic or linguistic elements of the attended speech is still unclear. To address the impact of noise on linguistic processing per se, we assessed how babble noise impacts the cortical tracking of intelligible speech devoid of prosody in school-aged children and adults.

Impact of Human Immunodeficiency Virus and Recreational Drugs on Cognitive Functions.

Background: This prospective study characterizes the structural and metabolic cerebral correlates of cognitive impairments found in a preclinical setting that considers the lifestyle of young European men exposed to human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), including recreational drugs.

Methods: Simultaneous structural brain magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and positron emission tomography using [18F]-fluorodeoxyglucose (FDG-PET) were acquired on a hybrid PET-MRI system in 23 asymptomatic young men having sex with men with HIV (HIVMSM; mean age, 33.6 years [range, 23-60 years]; normal CD4+ cell count, undetectable viral load).

The role of reading experience in atypical cortical tracking of speech and speech-in-noise in dyslexia.

Dyslexia is a frequent developmental disorder in which reading acquisition is delayed and that is usually associated with difficulties understanding speech in noise. At the neuronal level, children with dyslexia were reported to display abnormal cortical tracking of speech (CTS) at phrasal rate. Here, we aimed to determine if abnormal tracking relates to reduced reading experience, and if it is modulated by the severity of dyslexia or the presence of acoustic noise.

Visual statistical learning in infancy: Discrimination of fine-grained regularities depends on early test trials.

Infants' ability to detect statistical regularities between visual objects has been demonstrated in previous studies (e.g., Kirkham et al.

Audio-visual integration in nonverbal or minimally verbal young autistic children.

Low integration of speech sounds with the mouth movements likely contributes to language acquisition disabilities that frequently characterize young autistic children. However, the existing empirical evidence either relies on complex verbal instructions or merely focuses on preferential gaze on in-synch videos. The former method is clearly unadapted for young, minimally, or nonverbal autistic children, while the latter has several biases, making it difficult to interpret the data.

Cortical tracking of speech in noise accounts for reading strategies in children.

Humans' propensity to acquire literacy relates to several factors, including the ability to understand speech in noise (SiN). Still, the nature of the relation between reading and SiN perception abilities remains poorly understood. Here, we dissect the interplay between (1) reading abilities, (2) classical behavioral predictors of reading (phonological awareness, phonological memory, and rapid automatized naming), and (3) electrophysiological markers of SiN perception in 99 elementary school children (26 with dyslexia).

Tracking the Effects of Top-Down Attention on Word Discrimination Using Frequency-tagged Neuromagnetic Responses.

Discrimination of words from nonspeech sounds is essential in communication. Still, how selective attention can influence this early step of speech processing remains elusive. To answer that question, brain activity was recorded with magnetoencephalography in 12 healthy adults while they listened to two sequences of auditory stimuli presented at 2.

Referential processing in 3- and 5-year-old children is egocentrically anchored.

An ongoing debate in the literature on language acquisition is whether preschool children process reference in an egocentric way or whether they spontaneously and by-default take their partner's perspective into account. The reported study implements a computerized referential task with a controlled trial presentation and simple verbal instructions. Contrary to the predictions of the partner-specific view, entrained referential precedents give rise to faster processing for 3- and 5-year-old children, independently of whether the conversational partner is the same as in the lexical entrainment phase or not.

Comparing the potential of MEG and EEG to uncover brain tracking of speech temporal envelope.

During connected speech listening, brain activity tracks speech rhythmicity at delta (∼0.5 Hz) and theta (4-8 Hz) frequencies. Here, we compared the potential of magnetoencephalography (MEG) and high-density electroencephalography (EEG) to uncover such speech brain tracking.

Saving the Perruchet effect: A role for the strength of the association in associative learning.

In a partial reinforcement schedule where a cue repeatedly predicts the occurrence of a target in consecutive trials, reaction times to the target tend to decrease in a monotonic fashion, while participants' expectancies for the target decrease at the same time. This dissociation between reaction times and expectancies-the so-called Perruchet effect-challenges the propositional view of learning, which posits that human conditioned responses result from conscious inferences about the relationships between events. However, whether the reaction time pattern reflects the strength of a putative cue-target link, or only non-associative processes, such as motor priming, remains unclear.

Learning the association between a context and a target location in infancy.

Extracting the statistical regularities present in the environment is a central learning mechanism in infancy. For instance, infants are able to learn the associations between simultaneously or successively presented visual objects (Fiser & Aslin, ; Kirkham, Slemmer & Johnson, ). The present study extends these results by investigating whether infants can learn the association between a target location and the context in which it is presented.

Interacting Effects of Instructions and Presentation Rate on Visual Statistical Learning.

The statistical regularities of a sequence of visual shapes can be learned incidentally. Arciuli et al. (2014) recently argued that intentional instructions only improve learning at slow presentation rates as they favor the use of explicit strategies.

Rapid Serial Auditory Presentation: A New Measure of Statistical Learning in Speech Segmentation.

The Rapid Serial Visual Presentation procedure is a method widely used in visual perception research. In this paper we propose an adaptation of this method which can be used with auditory material and enables assessment of statistical learning in speech segmentation. Adult participants were exposed to an artificial speech stream composed of statistically defined trisyllabic nonsense words.

Disentangling fast and slow attentional influences of negative and taboo spoken words in the emotional Stroop paradigm.

Although the influence of the emotional content of stimuli on attention has been considered as occurring within trial, recent studies revealed that the presentation of such stimuli would also involve a slow component. The aim of the present study was to investigate fast and slow effects of negative (Exp. 1) and taboo (Exp.

Visual statistical learning in children and young adults: how implicit?

Visual statistical learning (VSL) is the ability to extract the joint and conditional probabilities of shapes co-occurring during passive viewing of complex visual configurations. Evidence indicates that even infants are sensitive to these regularities (e.g.

The Brussels Mood Inductive Audio Stories (MIAS) database.

Through this study, we aimed to validate a new tool for inducing moods in experimental contexts. Five audio stories with sad, joyful, frightening, erotic, or neutral content were presented to 60 participants (33 women, 27 men) in a within-subjects design, each for about 10 min. Participants were asked (1) to report their moods before and after listening to each story, (2) to assess the emotional content of the excerpts on various emotional scales, and (3) to rate their level of projection into the stories.

Side effects of being blue: influence of sad mood on visual statistical learning.

It is well established that mood influences many cognitive processes, such as learning and executive functions. Although statistical learning is assumed to be part of our daily life, as mood does, the influence of mood on statistical learning has never been investigated before. In the present study, a sad vs.

When a bang makes you run away: spatial avoidance of threatening environmental sounds.

Environmental sounds can be powerful alarm signals. Hence, attentional orienting towards their location might occur extremely rapidly. Here, we used the beep probe task to investigate attentional biases to negative, positive and taboo sounds.

Lack of habituation to shocking words: the attentional bias to their spatial origin is context free.

Following a suggestion made by Aquino and Arnell (2007), we assumed that the processing of emotional words is influenced by their context of presentation. Supporting this idea, previous studies using the emotional Stroop task in its visual or auditory variant revealed different results depending on the mixed versus blocked presentation of the stimuli (Bertels, Kolinsky, Pietrons, & Morais, 2011; Richards, French, Johnson, Naparstek, & Williams, 1992). In the present study, we investigated the impact of these presentation designs on the occurrence of spatial attentional biases in a modified version of the beep-probe task (Bertels, Kolinsky, & Morais, 2010).

How implicit is visual statistical learning?

In visual statistical learning, participants learn the statistical regularities present in a sequence of visual shapes. A recent study (Kim, Seitz, Feenstra, & Shams, 2009) suggests that visual statistical learning occurs implicitly, as it is not accompanied by conscious awareness of these regularities. However, that interpretation of the data depends on 2 unwarranted assumptions concerning the nature and sensitivity of the tasks used to measure learning.