The ordinal distance effect in working memory: does it exist in the absence of confounds?

In most daily-life situations, briefly remembering actions or words is not sufficient to reach a goal. You often have to remember them in a specific order. One behavioural observation of the processing of ordinal information in working memory is the ordinal distance effect.

Feeling and deciding: Subjective experiences rather than objective factors drive the decision to invest cognitive control.

When presented with the choice to invest cognitive control in a task, several signals are monitored to reach a decision. Leading theoretical frameworks argued that the investment of cognitive control is determined by a cost-benefit computation. However, previous accounts remained silent on the potential role of subjective experience in this computation.

Contributions of age and clinical depression to metacognitive performance.

One aspect of metacognition is the ability to judge the accuracy of our own performance, even in the absence of external feedback, which is often measured using confidence ratings. Past research suggests that confidence is lower in Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Less is known about the ability of MDD patients to discriminate correct from incorrect performance (metacognitive efficiency).

Local use-dependent activity triggers mind wandering: Resource depletion or executive dysfunction?

Mind wandering (MW) is a highly prevalent phenomenon despite its negative consequences on behavior. Current views about its origin share the idea that MW occurs due to changes in the executive functions system. Here, we argue that not all instances of MW are necessarily related to changes in that system.

The relation between task-relatedness of anxiety and metacognitive performance.

It is well established that anxiety influences a range of cognitive processes such as cognitive control or decision-making. What is less known is how anxiety influences the metacognitive evaluations individuals make about their own performance. The present study explored the importance of task-relatedness in the relation between anxiety and metacognitive awareness.

Automatic Processing of Numerosity in Human Neocortex Evidenced by Occipital and Parietal Neuromagnetic Responses.

Humans and other animal species are endowed with the ability to sense, represent, and mentally manipulate the number of items in a set without needing to count them. One central hypothesis is that this ability relies on an automated functional system dedicated to numerosity, the perception of the discrete numerical magnitude of a set of items. This system has classically been associated with intraparietal regions, however accumulating evidence in favor of an early visual number sense calls into question the functional role of parietal regions in numerosity processing.

Happy is easy: the influence of affective states on cognitive control and metacognitive reports.

In many situations, engaging cognitive control is required to override automatic responses and to behave in an adaptive manner. However, cognitive control is also effortful and costly which makes it aversive. A fundamental question is how individuals decide to engage or not in cognitive control based on the costs of this effort and the motivation to achieve the goals.

Ordinality: The importance of its trial list composition and examining its relation with adults' arithmetic and mathematical reasoning.

Understanding whether a sequence is presented in an order or not (i.e., ordinality) is a robust predictor of adults' arithmetic performance, but the mechanisms underlying this skill and its relationship with mathematics remain unclear.

The influence of sad mood induction on task performance and metacognition.

In many situations, the ability to make appropriate metacognitive judgements on our performance is essential to make decisions and adapt our behaviour. Past research suggests a strong relationship between metacognition and emotional disorders such as depression. Depressive disorders have been associated with an underestimation bias: depressive patients report lower confidence in their performance than healthy individuals.

The Role of Subjective Experiences in Conflict Tasks: A Review.

Cognitive control research is concerned with the question how we install adaptive behaviour in the case of (cognitive) conflict. In this review we focus on the role that awareness of this conflict plays in our ability to exert cognitive control. We will argue that visual conflict is not the only building block of metacognitive experiences of conflict and discuss how they are related to cognitive control.

Local build-up of sleep pressure could trigger mind wandering: Evidence from sleep, circadian and mind wandering research.

Mind wandering (MW), or having thoughts unrelated to the task at hand, is a very pervasive phenomenon. Although research on MW has exponentially grown during the last decade and a half, the mechanisms behind this omnipresent phenomenon remain largely unknown. In this review, we will discuss some factors that have been shown to contribute to the occurrence of MW: the quality of sleep, the time of day when the task is performed, the chronotype of the individual and the duration of the task.

The neural signature of numerosity by separating numerical and continuous magnitude extraction in visual cortex with frequency-tagged EEG.

The ability to handle approximate quantities, or number sense, has been recurrently linked to mathematical skills, although the nature of the mechanism allowing to extract numerical information (i.e., numerosity) from environmental stimuli is still debated.

Proactive interference in aging: A model-based study.

Proactive interference occurs when previously learned information interrupts the storage or retrieval of new information. Congruent with previous reports, traditional analyses dealing with response times and error rates separately have indicated an increase in sensitivity to proactive interference in older adults. We reanalyzed the same data using diffusion decision model (DDM).

Influence of content and intensity of thought on behavioral and pupil changes during active mind-wandering, off-focus, and on-task states.

Mind wandering (MW) is a pervasive phenomenon that occurs very frequently, regardless of the task. A content-based definition of MW holds that it occurs when the content of thought switches from an ongoing task and/or an external stimulus-driven event to self-generated or inner thoughts. A recent account suggests that the transition between these different states of attention occurs via an off-focus state.

The unfolding action model of initiation times, movement times, and movement paths.

Converging evidence has led to a consensus in favor of computational models of behavior implementing continuous information flow and parallel processing between cognitive processing stages. Yet, such models still typically implement a discrete step between the last cognitive stage and motor implementation. This discrete step is implemented as a fixed decision bound that activation in the last cognitive stage needs to cross before action can be initiated.

Task-Relevant Information Modulates Primary Motor Cortex Activity Before Movement Onset.

Monkey neurophysiology research supports the affordance competition hypothesis (ACH) proposing that cognitive information useful for action selection is integrated in sensorimotor areas. In this view, action selection would emerge from the simultaneous representation of competing action plans, in parallel biased by relevant task factors. This biased competition would take place up to primary motor cortex (M1).

Impact of ageing on problem size and proactive interference in arithmetic facts solving.

Arithmetic facts (AFs) are required when solving problems such as "3 × 4" and refer to calculations for which the correct answer is retrieved from memory. Currently, two important effects that modulate the performance in AFs have been highlighted: the problem size effect and the proactive interference effect. The aim of this study is to investigate possible age-related changes of the problem size effect and the proactive interference effect in AF solving.

Why try saving the ANS? An alternative proposal.

Leibovich et al. propose that continuous magnitudes and a number sense are used holistically to judge numerosity. We point out that their proposal is incomplete and implausible: incomplete, as it does not explain how continuous magnitudes are calculated; implausible, as it cannot explain performance in estimation tasks.

Hemispatial neglect and serial order in verbal working memory.

Working memory refers to our ability to actively maintain and process a limited amount of information during a brief period of time. Often, not only the information itself but also its serial order is crucial for good task performance. It was recently proposed that serial order is grounded in spatial cognition.

Objectifying the subjective: Building blocks of metacognitive experiences in conflict tasks.

Metacognitive appraisals are essential for optimizing our information processing. In conflict tasks, metacognitive appraisals can result from different interrelated features (e.g.

Continuous track paths reveal additive evidence integration in multistep decision making.

Multistep decision making pervades daily life, but its underlying mechanisms remain obscure. We distinguish four prominent models of multistep decision making, namely serial stage, hierarchical evidence integration, hierarchical leaky competing accumulation (HLCA), and probabilistic evidence integration (PEI). To empirically disentangle these models, we design a two-step reward-based decision paradigm and implement it in a reaching task experiment.

Introspection of subjective feelings is sensitive and specific.

Conversely to behaviorist ideas, recent studies suggest that introspection can be accurate and reliable. However, an unresolved question is whether people are able to report specific aspects of their phenomenal experience, or whether they report more general nonspecific experiences. To address this question, we investigated the sensitivity and validity of our introspection for different types of conflict.

Coding of serial order in verbal, visual and spatial working memory.

In the domain of working memory, recent theories postulate that the maintenance of serial order is driven by position marking. According to this idea, serial order is maintained though associations of each item with an independent representation of the position that the item constitutes in the sequence. Recent studies suggest that those position markers are spatial in nature, with the beginning items associated with left side and the end elements with the right side of space (i.

Contribution of visuospatial attention, short-term memory and executive functions to performance in number interval bisection.

Number interval bisection consists of estimating the mid-number within a pair (1-9=>5). Healthy adults and right-brain damage patients can show biased performance in this task, underestimating and overestimating the mid-number, respectively. The role of visuospatial attention during this task, and its interplay with other cognitive abilities (e.

Metacognition and cognitive control: behavioural adaptation requires conflict experience.

Cognitive control allows adapting our behaviour to improve performance. A behavioural signature of cognitive control is the Gratton effect. This effect is observed in conflict tasks and indicates smaller congruency effects after incongruent trials than after congruent trials.