Développement de la mémoire de travail et aide au maintien du but: Investigation du rôle joué par l'indiçage du but dans le fonctionnement de la mémoire de travail verbale chez les enfants de 4 à 9 ans

Cruciale dans les apprentissages, notamment scolaires, la mémoire de travail se développe avec l’avancée en âge durant l’enfance. Ce travail de thèse vise à élargir nos connaissances sur le développement de son fonctionnement entre la période préscolaire et la période scolaire. De précédente études ont démontré que la négligence du but contribuait au faible contrôle exécutif des enfants d’âge préscolaire. Par conséquent, présenter des indices de but durant une tâche améliore les performances des enfants dans des tâches d’inhibition et de flexibilité. Paradoxalement, quasiment aucune étude ne s’est interrogée sur le rôle que pourrait jouer un défaut de maintien du but dans les faibles performances des enfants les plus jeunes dans les tâches de mémoire de travail. C’est l’objet du présent travail. Ce sujet a été traité en introduisant, durant l’intervalle de rétention de paradigmes de type Brown-Peterson et des tâches d’empan simple ou complexe, des indices de but pouvant être exogènes (visuels ou auditivo-verbaux), exogènes et associés à un indiçage endogène (effectuer une gestuelle porteuse de sens), ou prendre la forme d’un jeu de rôle. Les résultats ont indiqué 1) que les enfants d’âge préscolaire répétaient plus fréquemment en présence d’un indiçage visuel sans toutefois que cela n’impacte leurs scores de rappel ; 2) qu’une association d’un indiçage exogène à un indiçage endogène améliore les performances en mémoire de travail des enfants ; 3) qu’effectuer en premier une condition de jeu de rôle permettait aux enfants de conserver le même niveau de performances en mémoire de travail dans une condition subséquente sans jeu de rôle. Toutefois, A) un indiçage auditivo-verbal a détérioré les performances de rappel des enfants ; B) l’effet bénéfique de l’association des indiçages exogène et endogène n’a pas été reproduit ; et C) l’effet bénéfique du jeu de rôle observé dans les études d’Istomina (1948) et de Bertrand et Camos (2015) ne fut pas répliqué. Ces évidences contrastent ainsi fortement avec les résultats d’autres tâches de contrôle exécutif et avec les résultats d’Istomina (1948) et de Bertrand et Camos (2015). Les limites du transfert de méthode d’un champ à un autre de la psychologie du développement sont discutées, ainsi que la capacité des enfants d’âge préscolaire à maintenir le but durant une tâche de mémoire de travail. Enfin, ce travail de thèse propose une ouverture vers l’étude du maintien du but dans des tâches d’empan complexe en modalité visiospatiale et non plus verbale lors de paradigmes de type Brown-Peterson.Crucial in learning, especially academic learning, working memory develops with age during childhood. This thesis aims to broaden our knowledge of working memory functioning development between the preschool period and the school period. Previous studies have shown that goal neglect contributed to kindergarteners’ poor executive control. Hence, presenting goal cues during a task improves children's performance in inhibition and switching tasks. Paradoxically, almost no study has questioned the role that failure to maintain the goal might play in the poor performance of younger children in working memory tasks. This is the topic of this work. This topic was been treated by introducing, during the retention interval in a Brown-Peterson task and in a simple or complex span task, goal cues that can be exogenous (visual or auditory-verbal), exogenous associated to an endogenous cueing (perform meaningful gestures) or taking the form of a role play. Results showed that 1) preschoolers rehearsed more frequently with a visual cue without improvement in their recall performance; 2) an association of an exogenous cue with an endogenous cue has improved kindergarteners’ working memory performance; 3) performing a role play first allowed kindergarteners to maintain the same level of working memory performance during a subsequent condition without role playing. However, A) an auditory-verbal cue was detrimental to kindergarteners’ recall; B) the beneficial effect of the association of exogenous and endogenous cues was not replicated; and C) the beneficial effect of role playing observed in Istomina (1948) and Bertrand and Camos (2015) was not replicated. This contrasts sharply with findings in other executive control tasks and with findings of Istomina (1948) and Bertrand and Camos (2015). The limits of transferring a method from different fields in developmental psychology and the ability of kindergarteners to maintain the goal during a working memory task are discussed. Finally, this thesis proposes an opening towards the study of goal maintenance in visuo-spatial complex span tasks contrary to Brown-Peterson verbal tasks

Working memory development and support for goal maintenance : the role of goal cueing in verbal working memory functioning in 4- to 9-year-old children

Cruciale dans les apprentissages scolaires, la mémoire de travail (MDT) se développe avec l’avancée en âge. De précédente études ont démontré que la négligence du but contribuait au faible contrôle exécutif des enfants d’âge préscolaire. Par conséquent, présenter des indices de but durant une tâche améliore les performances des enfants dans des tâches d’inhibition et de flexibilité. Paradoxalement, quasiment aucune étude ne s’est interrogée sur le rôle que pourrait jouer un défaut de maintien du but dans les faibles performances des enfants les plus jeunes lors de tâches de MDT. Dans cette thèse, ce sujet a été traité en introduisant, durant la réalisation de tâches de MDT, des indices de but pouvant être exogènes (visuels ou auditivo-verbaux), exogènes et associés à un indiçage endogène (effectuer une gestuelle porteuse de sens), ou prendre la forme d’un jeu de rôle. Les résultats ont indiqué 1) que les enfants d’âge préscolaire répétaient plus fréquemment en présence d’un indiçage visuel sans toutefois que cela n’impacte les scores de rappel ; 2) qu’une association d’un indiçage exogène à un indiçage endogène améliore la MDT des enfants ; 3) qu’effectuer en premier une condition de jeu de rôle permettait aux enfants de conserver le même niveau de performances en MDT dans une condition subséquente sans jeu de rôle. Toutefois, A) un indiçage auditivo-verbal a détérioré les performances de rappel des enfants ; B) l’effet bénéfique de l’association des indiçages exogène et endogène n’a pas été reproduit ; C) l’effet bénéfique du jeu de rôle observé dans les études d’Istomina (1948) et de Bertrand et Camos (2015) ne fut pas répliqué.Crucial in academic learning, working memory (WM) develops with age. Previous studies have shown that goal neglect contributed to kindergarteners’ poor executive control. Hence, presenting goal cues during a task improves children's performance in inhibition and switching tasks. Paradoxically, almost no study has questioned the role that failure to maintain the goal might play in the poor performance of younger children in WM tasks. In this thesis, this topic was been treated by introducing, during the retention interval in a Brown-Peterson task and in a simple or complex span task, goal cues that can be exogenous (visual or auditory-verbal), exogenous associated to an endogenous cueing (perform meaningful gestures) or taking the form of a role play. Results showed that 1) preschoolers rehearsed more frequently with a visual cue without improvement in their recall performance; 2) an association of an exogenous cue with an endogenous cue has improved kindergarteners’ WM performance; 3) performing a role play first allowed kindergarteners to maintain the same level of WM performance during a subsequent condition without role playing. However, A) an auditory-verbal cue was detrimental to kindergarteners’ recall; B) the beneficial effect of the association of exogenous and endogenous cues was not replicated; and C) the beneficial effect of role playing observed in Istomina (1948) and Bertrand and Camos (2015) was not replicated. This thesis proposes an opening towards the study of goal maintenance in visuo-spatial complex span tasks contrary to Brown-Peterson verbal tasks

Christophe Fitamen's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

Five-Year-Old Children’s Working Memory Can Be Improved When Children Act On A Transparent Goal Cue

International audienc

The role of goal cueing in kindergarteners' working memory

Goal neglect has been shown to contribute to kindergarteners’ poor executive control. Hence, presenting goal cues during a task improves children’s performance in inhibition and switching tasks. The current study aimed at extending these findings to working memory (WM) by examining the extent to which kindergarteners’ poor WM performance can result from neglecting the goal to recall memoranda at the end of the retention interval. This question was addressed by introducing goal cues, either visual (Experiments 1 and 2a) or auditory–verbal (Experiment 2b), during the retention interval in a Brown–Peterson task. Results showed no evidence of recall improvement for any cue. However, kindergarteners rehearsed more often in the presence of a visual goal cue, whereas recall was impaired with the presentation of an auditory–verbal goal cue. This suggests that introducing a goal cue in the retention interval of a WM task triggers the use of rehearsal in kindergarteners, albeit without any benefit in WM performance. This contrasts sharply with findings on other executive control tasks. Reasons why goal cues failed to improve kindergarteners’ WMperformance are discussed

Do goal cue and motor activity impact preschoolers’ working memory?

Preschoolers are well known for their poor working memory (WM) performance. This could result from goal neglect, which would hamper the setting of maintenance strategies. Previous studies have shown that preschoolers’ WM performance can be improved in game-like tasks, because they provide cues to support goal maintenance. However, in these studies, it was unclear what features of the task (either the main toy or the motor activity required by the game) provide efficient cues. The aim of the present study was to disentangle the two features to examine cue effects in 5- to 7-year-old children. No improvement of WM performance was observed when the toy was a potential goal cue, whereas the motor activity had a detrimental effect in all age groups. The latter effect could result from a distraction of attention from attention-based maintenance activities. Hence, preschoolers’ poor WM performance would not be fundamentally due to goal neglect

The role of goal cueing in kindergarteners’ working memory

International audienc

The determinants of working memory: past proposals and new findings

Working memory is the limited-capacity cognitive system in charge of maintaining information in the short-term. A number of promising explanations have been proposed to justify the drastic increase in working memory performance throughout childhood, such as a pure increase in storage capacity, or the strategic use of maintenance mechanisms. However, one may wonder whether these determinants are still of interest. This symposium aims at highlighting the most recent work of five different developmental labs and their most recent findings on working memory development. The symposium will shed light on the role of attentional control and goal maintenance in children's working memory development, and will show the latest findings about the development of interrogative susceptibility in relation to working memory, the spontaneous use of attentional refreshing, and the developmental trajectories of memory for multi-feature objects

Spotlight on the Survival Processing Advantage': An FNIRS Study on Adaptive Memory

International audienceIn the present study, participants had to rate words for their relevance in an ancestral survival scenario (e.g., is bottle relevant in the fictious scenario of being stranded in the grasslands of a foreign land without basic supplies) and for their pleasantness (e.g., is bottle a pleasant word?). A distractor task lasting a few minutes followed and the participants were then tested on their recall of the words. We used fNIRS to bilaterally monitor the dorsolateral-prefrontal cortex (DLPFC, known to be involved in strategic encoding) during the processing of verbal material in these two deep encoding situations. At the behavioral level, we replicated the survival processing advantage in recall rates, with the result that words processed for their survival value were better remembered than words processed for their pleasantness value. Importantly, at the neural level, we observed a lesser activation of the DLPFC during verbal encoding in the pleasantness condition compared to the survival condition, thus supporting the hypothesis that the survival processing advantage is underpinned by effortful processes, and more specifically relational processing

SenseCam: A new tool for memory rehabilitation?

International audienceThe emergence of life-logging technologies has led neuropsychologist to focus on understanding how this new technology could help patients with memory disorders. Despite the growing number of studies using life-logging technologies, a theoretical framework supporting its effectiveness is lacking. This review focuses on the use of life-logging in the context of memory rehabilitation, particularly the use of SenseCam, a wearable camera allowing passive image capture. In our opinion, reviewing SenseCam images can be effective for memory rehabilitation only if it provides more than an assessment of prior occurrence in ways that reinstates previous thoughts, feelings and sensory information, thus stimulating recollection. Considering the fact that, in memory impairment, self-initiated processes are impaired, we propose that the environmental support hypothesis can explain the value of SenseCam for memory retrieval. Twenty-five research studies were selected for this review and despite the general acceptance of the value of SenseCam as a memory technique, only a small number of studies focused on recollection. We discuss the usability of this tool to improve episodic memory and in particular, recollection