The Shift from Local to Global Visual Processing in 6-Year-Old Children Is Associated with Grey Matter Loss

International audienceBackground: A real-world visual scene consists of local elements (e.g. trees) that are arranged coherently into a global configuration (e.g. a forest). Children show psychological evolution from a preference for local visual information to an adult-like preference for global visual information, with the transition in visual preference occurring around 6 years of age. The brain regions involved in this shift in visual preference have not been described. Methods and Results: We used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to study children during this developmental window to investigate changes in gray matter that underlie the shift from a bias for local to global visual information. Six-year-old children were assigned to groups according to their judgment on a global/local task. The first group included children who still presented with local visual processing biases, and the second group included children who showed global visual processing biases. VBM results indicated that compared to children with local visual processing biases, children with global visual processing biases had a loss of gray matter in the right occipital and parietal visuospatial areas. Conclusions: These anatomical findings are in agreement with previous findings in children with neurodevelopmental disorders and represent the first structural identification of brain regions that allow healthy children to develop a global perception of the visual world

Le rôle de l'hémisphère droit dans la compréhension du langage: exemple de la prosodie affective

National audienceL’exemple de la prosodie affective, élément paralinguistique, va nous permettre de discuter le rôle de l’hémisphère droit dans le langage. Grâce à un paradigme d’IRMf nous avons montré que la communication verbale affective nécessite l’intégration des informations ortholinguistiques et paralinguistiques respectivement traitées par l’hémisphère gauche et droit, ainsi que la mise en jeu des réseaux neuraux de la théorie de l’esprit (TOM, Beaucousin et collaborateurs. 2007. FMRI study of emotional speech comprehension. Cerebral Cortex. 17[2]:339-352). Ces résultats nous permettent de comprendre les divergences observées quant à la spécialisation hémisphérique de la prosodie affective dans la littérature. L’implication du réseau TOM dans la catégorisation du contenu lexical affectif apporte une nouvelle vision des résultats décrits en Neuropsychologie. La latéralisation droite des régions cérébrales du traitement de la prosodie affective sera discutée à partir de la théorie sur la spécialisation hémisphérique du traitement des éléments acoustiques du langage

Développement et validation psycholinguistique d'un corpus pour l'étude des bases neurales de la prosodie affective

JEP 2004, Fès, Maroc, 19-22 avril 2004 ; Édités par Bernard Bel & Isabelle Marlien ; conférence organisée par Laboratoire Parole et Langage (CNRS - Université de Provence), Université Sidi Mohamed Ben Abdellah (Fès), École Normale Supérieure (Fès).Titre de dos : JEP 2004, Fès-Maroc, 19-22 avril 2004.Autre(s) titre(s) : Journées d'études sur la parole 2004JEP 200425èmes Journées d'études sur la parole25èmes JEPISBN : 2-9518233-3-9.This study is carried out in the framework of research on affective prosody. It concentrates on the role of prosody in the recognition of various types of expressive messages. The work presented here, which is the fruit of the collaboration between cognitive neuroimaging and linguistic research teams located at the University of Caen, is aimed at elaborating and validating linguistic material for the study of the neural bases of emotions and attitudes with functional magnetic resonance imaging

FMRI Study of Emotional Speech Comprehension

Little is known about the neural correlates of affective prosody in the context of affective semantic discourse. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate this issue while subjects performed 1) affective classification of sentences having an affective semantic content and 2) grammatical classification of sentences with neutral semantic content. Sentences of each type were produced half by actors and half by a text-to-speech software lacking affective prosody. Compared with neutral sentences processing, sentences with affective semantic content—with or without affective prosody—led to an increase in activation of a left inferior frontal area involved in the retrieval of semantic knowledge. In addition, the posterior part of the left superior temporal sulcus (STS) together with the medial prefrontal cortex were recruited, although not activated by neutral sentences classification. Interestingly, these areas have been described as implicated during self-reflection or other's mental state inference that possibly occurred during the affective classification task. When affective prosody was present, additional rightward activations of the human-selective voice area and the posterior part of STS were observed, corresponding to the processing of speaker's voice emotional content. Accurate affective communication, central to social interactions, requires the cooperation of semantics, affective prosody, and mind-reading neural networks

Meaningfulness and global-local processing in schizophrenia

International audienceThe present work aimed to study the influence of the meaningfulness of stimuli during global-local processing in schizophrenia. Study participants were asked to determine whether pairs of compound stimuli (global forms composed of local forms) were identical or not. Both global and local forms represented either objects or non-objects. Results indicated that when identification processes were useful for performing the task, similar global-local response patterns were observed in patients and controls. However, patients were more affected than controls when an object was present at a distractor level, particularly when this information came from the local level. These results are discussed in terms of the conjunction of executive and visuospatial deficits and underscore the importance of meaningful identification in the visual perception of schizophrenia patients, given its central role in day-today situations

Evidence of different developmental trajectories for length estimation according to egocentric and allocentric viewpoints in children and adults.

International audienceThis study investigated the influence of egocentric and allocentric viewpoints on a comparison task of length estimation in children and adults. A total of 100 participants ranging in age from 5 years to adulthood were presented with virtual scenes representing a park landscape with two paths, one straight and one serpentine. Scenes were presented either from an egocentric or allocentric viewpoint. Results showed that when the two paths had the same length, participants always overestimated the length of the straight line for allocentric trials, whereas a development from a systematic overestimation in children to an underestimation of the straight line length in adults was found for egocentric trials. We discuss these findings in terms of the influences of both bias-inhibition processes and school acquisitions

Adult brains don't fully overcome biases that lead to incorrect performance during cognitive development: an fMRI study in young adults completing a Piaget-like task

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Functional magnetic resonance imaging study of Piaget’s conservation-of-number task in preschool and school-age children: A neo-Piagetian approach

International audienceJean Piaget’s theory is a central reference point in the study of logico-mathematical development in children. One of the most famous Piagetian tasks is number conservation. Failures and successes in this task reveal two fundamental stages in children’s thinking and judgment, shifting at approximately 7 years of age from visuospatial intuition to number conservation. In the current study, preschool children (nonconservers, 5–6 years of age) and school-age children (conservers, 9–10 years of age) were presented with Piaget’s conservation-of-number task and monitored by functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). The cognitive change allowing children to access conservation was shown to be related to the neural contribution of a bilateral parietofrontal network involved in numerical and executive functions. These fMRI results highlight how the behavioral and cognitive stages Piaget formu-lated during the 20th century manifest in the brain with age

3D rendering (left) and sagittal views (right) show the loss of gray matter volume between the local bias group and global bias group of children.

<p>L: left; R: right. For illustrative purposes, the maps were thresholded at <i>p</i> = 0.01.</p

Anatomic localization, localization extent, MNI coordinates, and Z scores for maximal gray matter volume differences between the local bias group and the global bias group of children.

<p>L: left; R: right.</p