Effects of material and non-material rewards on remembering to do things for others.

Recent research has shown that pro-social prospective memory, i.e., remembering to do something for others, is negatively affected by the presence of small material rewards. While this competition between pro-social and self-gain motives leads to poor memory for the intention, people do not seem to be aware of the possible collision effects of competing motives (Brandimonte et al., 2010). Extending research on this general topic, in two activity-based prospective memory (PM) experiments, we explored the effects of different types and amount of rewards on pro-social prospective remembering. In Experiment 1, participants could receive no reward, a low material reward (1 euro), or a high material reward (20 euro) for their pro-social PM action. In Experiment 2, their pro-social PM performance could be rewarded or not with an image reward (disclosure of their altruistic behavior). Results revealed that introducing a small material reward (Experiment 1) or a non-material reward (Experiment 2) impaired pro-social PM. However, introducing a high material reward eliminated the impairment (Experiment 1). Importantly, in Experiment 1, ongoing task performance in the pro-social condition was faster than in the No PM condition. However, in Experiment 2, ongoing task costs emerged in the presence of a non-material reward, as compared to the pro-social condition. Also, results from two independent ratings showed that people's predictions on their future pro-social actions were at odds (Experiment 1) or in line (Experiment 2) with actual PM performance. It is suggested that, according to the nature and amount of rewards, memory for a pro-social future action may be modulated by conscious or unconscious motivational mechanisms

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

peer reviewedEmerging 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. The present study examined self-directed control development by adapting the voluntary task switching paradigm-the gold standard measure of this control form in adults-for use with 5-6-year-old and 9-10-year-old children. Overall, p(switch) suggested that even younger children can engage self-directed control successfully. However, other measures showed they struggled with task selection. Specifically, compared with older children and adults, they relied more on systematic strategies which reduced the cost of task selection, even when the strategy involved switching more often. Like externally driven control, self-directed control relies critically on task selection processes. These two forms of control likely form a continuum rather than two discrete categories. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved)

When the Mind “Flies”: the Effects of Mind-Wandering on Driving

Mind wandering (MW) refers to a shift of attention away from a primary task toward internal information, such as memories, future thoughts, or fantasies. Several lines of research showed that MW has a costly influence on many cognitive processes, such as reading comprehension, sustained attention and working memory. The aim of the present study was to assess whether MW impairs, like secondary-task distraction, driver’s performance. Results showed that MW is indeed pervasive during daily driving, as indicated by the participants’ answers to an ad-hoc questionnaire assessing the source of inattentiveness during daily driving; furthermore, MW states detected during simulated driving were found to affect driving performance

When do words hurt? A multiprocess view of the effects of verbalization on visual memory

Verbal overshadowing reflects the impairment in memory performance following verbalization of nonverbal stimuli. However, it is not clear whether the same mechanisms are responsible for verbal overshadowing effects observed with different stimuli and task demands. In the present article, we propose a multiprocess view that reconciles the main theoretical explanations of verbal overshadowing deriving from the use of different paradigms. Within a single paradigm, we manipulated both the nature of verbalization at encoding (nameability of the stimuli) and postencoding (verbal descriptions), as well as the nature (image transformation or recognition) and, by implication, the demands of the final memory task (global or featural). Results from 3 experiments replicated the negative effects of encoding and postencoding verbalization in imagery and recognition tasks, respectively. However, they also showed that the demands of the final memory task can modulate or even reverse verbal overshadowing effects due to both postencoding verbalization and naming during encoding

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

peer reviewedGaining 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. To disentangle the respective contributions of these processes, we manipulated the difficulty of context-tracking via altering the presence or absence of contextual support (Study 1) and the difficulty of task selection by varying task difficulty (a)symmetry (Study 2) in 5-6 and 9-10-year-olds, and adults. Results suggested that, although both processes contribute to successful self-directed engagement of cognitive control, age-related progress mostly relates to context-tracking