Effects of an occupational soft-back exoskeleton during order picking: a field study in logistics.

The use of exoskeletons is increasingly considered as a solution to reduce workers' exposure to physical risk factors, such as low-back disorders. The aim of this study was to evaluate the effects of the CORFOR occupational soft-back exoskeleton on trunk muscle activity and kinematics during an order picking manual task performed in the field. 10 workers, with at least 4 weeks' experience using the exoskeleton, performed a 1.

Unraveling the small tie problem mystery: Size effects from finger counting to mental strategies in addition.

Determining how children solve arithmetic problems when they stop using their fingers is a real challenge. To take it up, the evolution of problem-size effects for tie and non-tie problems was observed when 6-year-olds (N = 65) shift from finger counting to mental strategies. These observations revealed that the problem-size effect remained the same for non-tie problems, whereas it drastically decreased for tie problems.

Do children need counting principle knowledge to count on their fingers?

It has been established that young children who use their fingers to solve arithmetic problems outperform those who do not. However, it remains unclear whether finger counting itself enhances arithmetic performance or if children with already advanced numerical abilities are more inclined to use this strategy. In the current study, to shed light on this matter, we observed the behavior of 189 4- and 5-year-old children in an addition task and a task assessing their knowledge of the three "how-to-count" principles (i.

Finger counting training enhances addition performance in kindergarteners.

Our study on 328 five- to six-year-old kindergarteners (mainly White European living in France, 152 girls) shows that children who do not count on their fingers and undergo finger counting training exhibit drastic improvement in their addition skills from pre-test to post-test (i.e., accuracy from 37.

The efficacy of manipulatives versus fingers in supporting young children's addition skills.

Recent empirical investigations have revealed that finger counting is a strategy associated with good arithmetic performance in young children. Fingers could have a special status during development because they operate as external support that provide sensory-motor and kinesthetic affordances in addition to visual input. However, it was unknown whether fingers are more helpful than manipulatives such as tokens during arithmetic problem solving.

Substrate metabolism in male astronauts onboard the International Space Station: the ENERGY study.

Bedrest shifts fasting and postprandial fuel selection towards carbohydrate use over lipids, potentially affecting astronauts' performance and health. We investigated whether this change occurs in astronauts after at least 3 months onboard the International Space Station (ISS). We further explored the associations with diet, physical activity (PA), and body composition.

French preschool and primary teachers' attitude towards finger counting.

Teachers' beliefs and attitudes are known to guide the type of activities they implement in their classrooms. A traditional conception that finger counting is merely a back-up when children fail to use more sophisticated and efficient strategies could therefore prevent teachers from encouraging children's use of fingers in arithmetic tasks. However, the potential benefit of finger counting for young learners has been recently documented and setting aside its practice within classrooms may hinder children's mathematical skill development.

Neural evidence for procedural automatization during cognitive development: Intraparietal response to changes in very-small addition problem-size increases with age.

Cognitive development is often thought to depend on qualitative changes in problem-solving strategies, with early developing algorithmic procedures (e.g., counting when adding numbers) considered being replaced by retrieval of associations (e.

Raw eye tracking data of healthy adults reading aloud words, pseudowords and numerals.

This paper describes data from de Chambrier et al. (2023). The dataset [2] contains raw eye tracking data of 36 healthy adults, collected using an EyeLink 1000 (SR Research Ltd.

The development of simple addition problem solving in children: Reliance on automatized counting or memory retrieval depends on both expertise and problem size.

In an experiment, 98 children aged 8 to 9, 10 to 12, and 13 to 15 years solved addition problems with a sum up to 10. In another experiment, the same children solved the same calculations within a sign priming paradigm where half the additions were displayed with the "+" sign 150 ms before the addends. Therefore, size effects and priming effects could be considered conjointly within the same populations.

Reading numbers is harder than reading words: An eye-tracking study.

We recorded the eye movements of adults reading aloud short (four digit) and long (eight to 11 digit) Arabic numerals compared to matched-in-length words and pseudowords. We presented each item in isolation, at the center of the screen. Participants read each item aloud at their pace, and then pressed the spacebar to display the next item.

Learning basic arithmetic: A comparison between rote and procedural learning based on an artificial sequence.

It is commonly accepted that repeatedly using mental procedures results in a transition to memory retrieval, but the determinant of this process is still unclear. In a 3-week experiment, we compared two different learning situations involving basic additions, one based on counting and the other based on arithmetic fact memorization. Two groups of participants learned to verify additions such as "G + 2 = Q?" built on an artificial sequence (e.

Acquisition of new arithmetic skills based on prior arithmetic skills: A cross-sectional study in primary school from grade 2 to grade 5.

Background: In several countries, children's math skills have been declining at an alarming rate in recent years and decades, and one of the explanations for this alarming situation is that children have difficulties in establishing the relations between arithmetical operations.

Aim: In order to address this question, our goal was to determine the predictive power of previously taught operations on newly taught ones above general cognitive skills and basic numerical skills.

Samples: More than one hundred children in each school level from Grades 2 to 5 from various socio-cultural environments (N = 435, 229 girls) were tested.

An insect brain organizes numbers on a left-to-right mental number line.

The "mental number line" (MNL) is a form of spatial numeric representation that associates small and large numbers with the left and right spaces, respectively. This spatio-numeric organization can be found in adult humans and has been related to cultural factors such as writing and reading habits. Yet, both human newborns and birds order numbers consistently with an MNL, thus raising the question of whether culture is a main explanation for MNL.

Passive limitation of surface contamination by perFluoroDecylTrichloroSilane coatings in the ISS during the MATISS experiments.

Future long-duration human spaceflight will require developments to limit biocontamination of surface habitats. The MATISS (Microbial Aerosol Tethering on Innovative Surfaces in the international Space Station) experiments allowed for exposing surface treatments in the ISS (International Space Station) using a sample-holder developed to this end. Three campaigns of FDTS (perFluoroDecylTrichloroSilane) surface exposures were performed over monthly durations during distinct periods.

Individual Differences in the Evolution of Counting.

The alphabet-arithmetic paradigm, in which adults are asked to add a numeral addend to a letter augend (e.g., D + 3 = G), was conceived to mimic the way children learn addition.

The Evolution of Finger Counting between Kindergarten and Grade 2.

In this longitudinal study, we aimed at determining whether children who efficiently use finger counting are more likely to develop internalized arithmetic strategies than children who are less efficient. More precisely, we analyzed the behavior of 24 kindergarteners aged between 5 and 6 years who used their fingers to solve addition problems, and we were interested in determining the evolution of their finger counting strategies towards mental strategies after 2 years (Grade 2). Our results show that kindergarteners who were the most proficient in calculating on fingers were the more likely to have abandoned this strategy in Grade 2.

Automatization through Practice: The Opportunistic-Stopping Phenomenon Called into Question.

As a theory of skill acquisition, the instance theory of automatization posits that, after a period of training, algorithm-based performance is replaced by retrieval-based performance. This theory has been tested using alphabet-arithmetic verification tasks (e.g.

Do production and verification tasks in arithmetic rely on the same cognitive mechanisms? A test using alphabet arithmetic.

In this study, 17 adult participants were trained to solve alphabet-arithmetic problems using a production task (e.g., C + 3 = ?).

Differences in event-related potential (ERP) responses to small tie, non-tie and 1-problems in addition and multiplication.

Using ERP, we investigated the cause of the tie advantage according to which problems with repeated operands are solved faster and more accurately than non-tie problems. We found no differences in early or N400 ERP components between problems, suggesting that tie problems are not encoded faster or suffer from less interference than non-tie problems. However, a lesser negative amplitude of the N2 component was found for tie than non-tie problems.

Priming effects of arithmetic signs in 10- to 15-year-old children.

In this research, 10- to 12- and 13- to 15-year-old children were presented with very simple addition and multiplication problems involving operands from 1 to 4. Critically, the arithmetic sign was presented before the operands in half of the trials, whereas it was presented at the same time as the operands in the other half. Our results indicate that presenting the 'x' sign before the operands of a multiplication problem does not speed up the solving process, irrespective of the age of children.