Cognition without control: When a little frontal lobe goes a long way

Directing Attention Shapes Learning in Adults but Not Children

Children sometimes learn distracting information better than adults do, perhaps because of the development of selective attention. To understand this potential link, we ask how the learning of children (aged 7-9 years) and the learning of adults differ when information is the directed focus of attention versus when it is not. Participants viewed drawings of common objects and were told to attend to the drawings (Experiment 1: 42 children, 35 adults) or indicate when shapes (overlaid on the drawings) repeated (Experiment 2: 53 children, 60 adults). Afterward, participants identified fragments of these drawings as quickly as possible. Adults learned better than children when directed to attend to the drawings; however, when drawings were task irrelevant, children showed better learning than adults in the first half of the test. And although directing attention to the drawings improved learning in adults, children learned the drawings similarly across experiments regardless of whether the drawings were the focus of the task or entirely irrelevant.

Exploration, Distributed Attention, and Development of Category Learning

Category learning is a crucial aspect of cognition that involves organizing entities into equivalence classes. Whereas adults tend to focus on category-relevant features, young children often distribute attention between relevant and irrelevant ones. The reasons for children's distributed attention are not fully understood. In two category-learning experiments with adults and with children aged 4, 5, and 6 (N = 201), we examined potential drivers of distributed attention, including (a) immature filtering of distractors and (b) the general tendency for exploration or broad information sampling. By eliminating distractor competition, we reduced filtering demands. Despite identifying the features critical for accurate categorization, children, regardless of their categorization performance, continued sampling more information than was necessary. These results indicate that the tendency to sample information extensively contributes to distributed attention in young children. We identify candidate drivers of this tendency that need to be examined in future research.

Observational reinforcement learning in children and young adults

Observational learning is essential for the acquisition of new behavior in educational practices and daily life and serves as an important mechanism for human cognitive and social-emotional development. However, we know little about its underlying neurocomputational mechanisms from a developmental perspective. In this study we used model-based fMRI to investigate differences in observational learning and individual learning between children and younger adults. Prediction errors (PE), the difference between experienced and predicted outcomes, related positively to striatal and ventral medial prefrontal cortex activation during individual learning and showed no age-related differences. PE-related activation during observational learning was more pronounced when outcomes were worse than predicted. Particularly, negative PE-coding in the dorsal medial prefrontal cortex was stronger in adults compared to children and was associated with improved observational learning in children and adults. The current findings pave the way to better understand observational learning challenges across development and educational settings.

Executive function elevated by long term high-intensity physical activity and the regulation role of beta-band activity in human frontal region

The importance of physical activity (PA) to people's health has become a consensus around the world, and regular long-term PA has been accepted as an alternative preventive measure for many chronic medical conditions. Although the daily PA have several benefits for the public, the systematic research on its effect in human physiology, cognition and cerebral nerve level is not fully studied. Hence, in this study, we aim to investigate this question in several specific aspects: basal heart rate, executive function, and neural oscillatory activity in the brain. A total of 146 subjects participated in this study and they were divided into two groups. One group (SG) is the long-term training (more than 8 years) subjects in soccer (n = 31), and the other group (CG) is a normal control group (n = 115). The heart rate was monitored with a portable equipment. Besides, 24 subjects (14 in SG and 10 in CG) participated the Go/No-Go task and EEG recording before and after exercise fatigue task. In the physiology level, we found that in the non-training time, the heart rate in CG group is significantly higher than that of the SG group (P < 0.001). In the cognition level, we found that the SG group has a faster reaction time that that of CG group (P < 0.01), while for the accuracy, two groups did show significant difference. In the neural level in the brain, we found a significant abnormal increased beta-band (around 25 Hz) activity in CG group after the exercise fatigue task immediately. Long-term high-intensity physical activity reduces basal heart rate, improves executive function, and improve the central tolerance of the body under the stimulation of fatigue and stress. These benefits of long-term activity could be used as a manual to guide people's healthy life.

Flexible structure learning under uncertainty

Experience is known to facilitate our ability to interpret sequences of events and make predictions about the future by extracting temporal regularities in our environments. Here, we ask whether uncertainty in dynamic environments affects our ability to learn predictive structures. We exposed participants to sequences of symbols determined by first-order Markov models and asked them to indicate which symbol they expected to follow each sequence. We introduced uncertainty in this prediction task by manipulating the: (a) probability of symbol co-occurrence, (b) stimulus presentation rate. Further, we manipulated feedback, as it is known to play a key role in resolving uncertainty. Our results demonstrate that increasing the similarity in the probabilities of symbol co-occurrence impaired performance on the prediction task. In contrast, increasing uncertainty in stimulus presentation rate by introducing temporal jitter resulted in participants adopting a strategy closer to probability maximization than matching and improving in the prediction tasks. Next, we show that feedback plays a key role in learning predictive statistics. Trial-by-trial feedback yielded stronger improvement than block feedback or no feedback; that is, participants adopted a strategy closer to probability maximization and showed stronger improvement when trained with trial-by-trial feedback. Further, correlating individual strategy with learning performance showed better performance in structure learning for observers who adopted a strategy closer to maximization. Our results indicate that executive cognitive functions (i.e., selective attention) may account for this individual variability in strategy and structure learning ability. Taken together, our results provide evidence for flexible structure learning; individuals adapt their decision strategy closer to probability maximization, reducing uncertainty in temporal sequences and improving their ability to learn predictive statistics in variable environments.

Changes in adaptation to time horizons across development

When making decisions, the amount of time remaining matters. When time horizons are long, exploring unknown options can inform later decisions, but when time horizons are short, exploiting known options should be prioritized. While adults and adolescents adapt their exploration in this way, it is unclear when such adaptation emerges and how individuals behave when time horizons are ambiguous, as in many real-life situations. We examined these questions by having 5- to 6-year-olds (N = 43), 11- to 12-year-olds (N = 40), and adult college students (N = 49) in the United States complete a Simplified Horizons Task under short, long, and ambiguous time horizons. Adaptation to time horizons increased with age: older children and adults explored more when horizons were long than when short, and while some younger children adapted to time horizons, younger children overall did not show strong evidence of adapting. Under ambiguous horizons, older children and adults preferred to exploit over explore, while younger children did not show this preference. Thus, adaptation to time horizons is evident by ages 11-12 and may begin to emerge around 5-6 years, and children decrease their tendencies to explore under short and ambiguous time horizons with development. This developmental shift may lead to less learning but more adaptive decision making. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Does prefrontal connectivity during task switching help or hinder children's performance?

The ability to flexibly switch between tasks is key for goal-directed behavior and continues to improve across childhood. Children's task switching difficulties are thought to reflect less efficient engagement of sustained and transient control processes, resulting in lower performance on blocks that intermix tasks (sustained demand) and trials that require a task switch (transient demand). Sustained and transient control processes are associated with frontoparietal regions, which develop throughout childhood and may contribute to task switching development. We examined age differences in the modulation of frontoparietal regions by sustained and transient control demands in children (8-11 years) and adults. Children showed greater performance costs than adults, especially under sustained demand, along with less upregulation of sustained and transient control activation in frontoparietal regions. Compared to adults, children showed increased connectivity between the inferior frontal junction (IFJ) and lateral prefrontal cortex (lPFC) from single to mixed blocks. For children whose sustained activation was less adult-like, increased IFJ-lPFC connectivity was associated with better performance. Children with more adult-like sustained activation showed the inverse effect. These results suggest that individual differences in task switching in later childhood at least partly depend on the recruitment of frontoparietal regions in an adult-like manner.

The body keeps the score: The neurobiological profile of traumatized adolescents

Trauma-related disorders are debilitating psychiatric conditions that affect people who have directly or indirectly witnessed adversities. Experiencing multiple types of traumas appears to be common during childhood, and even more so during adolescence. Dramatic brain/body transformations occurring during adolescence may provide a highly responsive substrate to external stimuli and lead to trauma-related vulnerability conditions, such as internalizing (anxiety, depression, anhedonia, withdrawal) and externalizing (aggression, delinquency, conduct disorders) problems. Analyzing relations among neuronal, endocrine, immune, and biochemical signatures of trauma and internalizing and externalizing behaviors, including the role of personality traits in shaping these conducts, this review highlights that the marked effects of traumatic experience on the brain/body involve changes at nearly every level of analysis, from brain structure, function and connectivity to endocrine and immune systems, from gene expression (including in the gut) to the development of personality.

Pay attention and you might miss it: Greater learning during attentional lapses

Attentional lapses have been found to impair everything from basic perception to learning and memory. Yet, despite the well-documented costs of lapses on cognition, recent work suggests that lapses might unexpectedly confer some benefits. One potential benefit is that lapses broaden our learning to integrate seemingly irrelevant content that could later prove useful-a benefit that prior research focusing only on goal-relevant memory would miss. Here, we measure how fluctuations in sustained attention influence the learning of seemingly goal-irrelevant content that competes for attention with target content. Participants completed a correlated flanker task in which they categorized central targets (letters or numbers) while ignoring peripheral flanking symbols that shared hidden probabilistic relationships with the targets. We found that across participants, higher rates of attentional lapses correlated with greater learning of the target-flanker relationships. Moreover, within participants, learning was more evident during attentional lapses. These findings address long-standing theoretical debates and reveal a benefit of attentional lapses: they expand the scope of learning and decisions beyond the strictly relevant.

Tramadol misuse in treatment-seeking adolescents and young adults with problematic substance use - Prediction of treatment retention

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Misuse of tramadol is increasingly highlighted as a problem in adolescents and adults.

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In treatment for substance use in the young, tramadol use increased the risk of treatment drop-out.

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Tramadol misuse, hitherto little examined, requires further clinical research.

Non-medical prescription use of opioids (NMPUO) is a public health concern worldwide. Recently, tramadol misuse is increasing, but the systematic research of misuse of this specific opioid is limited. This study set out to assess the relationship between tramadol use and completion of treatment for substance use among adolescents and adults ≤ 25 years in an outpatient clinical setting. A retrospective cohort study of treatment outcome, expressed as “completion” or “non-completion” of treatment, was conducted in treatment-seeking adolescents with problematic substance use (n = 335). Data was extracted from Ung-DOK interviews, a semi-structured assessment instrument designed for adolescents with substance abuse. The study included all treatment-seeking patients at an out-patient facility in 2014–2017. A total of 26% (n = 88) were tramadol users (life-time prevalence). Twenty percent (n = 66) of all treatments were non-completed. Tramadol users were significantly more likely than non-users to drop out of treatment (35% vs 15%, p < 0.001). In multivariate logistic regression, tramadol use and age 18 and above were factors significantly associated with non-completion. Tramadol use was statistically significantly associated with non-completion of treatment. Further research addressing treatment needs and treatment completion among tramadol users is needed.

The Age of Reason: Functional Brain Network Development during Childhood

Human childhood is characterized by dramatic changes in the mind and brain. However, little is known about the large-scale intrinsic cortical network changes that occur during childhood because of methodological challenges in scanning young children. Here, we overcome this barrier by using sophisticated acquisition and analysis tools to investigate functional network development in children between the ages of 4 and 10 years ([Formula: see text]; 50 female, 42 male). At multiple spatial scales, age is positively associated with brain network segregation. At the system level, age was associated with segregation of systems involved in attention from those involved in abstract cognition, and with integration among attentional and perceptual systems. Associations between age and functional connectivity are most pronounced in visual and medial prefrontal cortex, the two ends of a gradient from perceptual, externally oriented cortex to abstract, internally oriented cortex. These findings suggest that both ends of the sensory-association gradient may develop early, in contrast to the classical theories that cortical maturation proceeds from back to front, with sensory areas developing first and association areas developing last. More mature patterns of brain network architecture, controlling for age, were associated with better visuospatial reasoning abilities. Our results suggest that as cortical architecture becomes more specialized, children become more able to reason about the world and their place in it.SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT Anthropologists have called the transition from early to middle childhood the "age of reason", when children across cultures become more independent. We employ cutting-edge neuroimaging acquisition and analysis approaches to investigate associations between age and functional brain architecture in childhood. Age was positively associated with segregation between cortical systems that process the external world and those that process abstract phenomena like the past, future, and minds of others. Surprisingly, we observed pronounced development at both ends of the sensory-association gradient, challenging the theory that sensory areas develop first and association areas develop last. Our results open new directions for research into how brains reorganize to support rapid gains in cognitive and socioemotional skills as children reach the age of reason.

An exploration of error-driven learning in simple two-layer networks from a discriminative learning perspective

Error-driven learning algorithms, which iteratively adjust expectations based on prediction error, are the basis for a vast array of computational models in the brain and cognitive sciences that often differ widely in their precise form and application: they range from simple models in psychology and cybernetics to current complex deep learning models dominating discussions in machine learning and artificial intelligence. However, despite the ubiquity of this mechanism, detailed analyses of its basic workings uninfluenced by existing theories or specific research goals are rare in the literature. To address this, we present an exposition of error-driven learning - focusing on its simplest form for clarity - and relate this to the historical development of error-driven learning models in the cognitive sciences. Although historically error-driven models have been thought of as associative, such that learning is thought to combine preexisting elemental representations, our analysis will highlight the discriminative nature of learning in these models and the implications of this for the way how learning is conceptualized. We complement our theoretical introduction to error-driven learning with a practical guide to the application of simple error-driven learning models in which we discuss a number of example simulations, that are also presented in detail in an accompanying tutorial.

Exploration heuristics decrease during youth

Deciding between exploring new avenues and exploiting known choices is central to learning, and this exploration-exploitation trade-off changes during development. Exploration is not a unitary concept, and humans deploy multiple distinct mechanisms, but little is known about their specific emergence during development. Using a previously validated task in adults, changes in exploration mechanisms were investigated between childhood (8-9 y/o, N = 26; 16 females), early (12-13 y/o, N = 38; 21 females), and late adolescence (16-17 y/o, N = 33; 19 females) in ethnically and socially diverse schools from disadvantaged areas. We find an increased usage of a computationally light exploration heuristic in younger groups, effectively accommodating their limited neurocognitive resources. Moreover, this heuristic was associated with self-reported, attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder symptoms in this population-based sample. This study enriches our mechanistic understanding about how exploration strategies mature during development.

Cognitive and contextual factors modulating grammar learning at older ages

Second language learning has been shown more difficult for older than younger adults, however, the research trying to identify the sources of difficulty and possible modulating factors is scarce. Extrinsic (learning condition and complexity) and intrinsic factors (executive control) have been related to L2-grammar learning in younger adults. In the present study, we aim to assess whether extrinsic and intrinsic factors are also modulating grammar learning in older adults. We compared the learning performance of younger and older adults in a L2 learning task. 162 Spanish native-speakers (81 young) learnt Japañol (Japanese syntaxis and Spanish lexicon) in either an intentional (metalinguistic explanation) or an incidental (comprehension of sentences) context. The complexity of the sentences was also manipulated by introducing (or not) a subordinate clause. Individual differences in proactivity were measured with the AX-CPT task. After the learning phase, participants performed a Grammatical Judgment Task where they answered if the presented sentences were grammatically correct. No differences between older and younger adults were found. Overall, better results were found for the intentional-condition than for the incidental-condition. A significant interaction between learning context and the proactivity index in the AX-CPT task showed that more proactive participants were better when learning in the incidental-condition. These results suggest that both extrinsic and intrinsic factors are important during language learning and that they equally affect younger and older adults.

Experimental evidence for a child-to-adolescent switch in human amygdala-prefrontal cortex communication: A cross-sectional pilot study

Interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal cortex are fundamental to human emotion. Despite the central role of frontoamygdala communication in adult emotional learning and regulation, little is known about how top-down control emerges during human development. In the present cross-sectional pilot study, we experimentally manipulated prefrontal engagement to test its effects on the amygdala during development. Inducing dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) activation resulted in developmentally-opposite effects on amygdala reactivity during childhood versus adolescence, such that dACC activation was followed by increased amygdala reactivity in childhood but reduced amygdala reactivity in adolescence. Bayesian network analyses revealed an age-related switch between childhood and adolescence in the nature of amygdala connectivity with the dACC and ventromedial PFC (vmPFC). Whereas adolescence was marked by information flow from dACC and vmPFC to amygdala (consistent with that observed in adults), the reverse information flow, from the amygdala to dACC and vmPFC, was dominant in childhood. The age-related switch in information flow suggests a potential shift from bottom-up co-excitatory to top-down regulatory frontoamygdala connectivity and may indicate a profound change in the circuitry supporting maturation of emotional behavior. These findings provide novel insight into the developmental construction of amygdala-cortical connections and implications for the ways in which childhood experiences may influence subsequent prefrontal function.

Inhibitory control and problem solving in early childhood: Exploring the burdens and benefits of high self-control

Low inhibitory control (IC) is sometimes associated with enhanced problem-solving amongst adults, yet for young children high IC is primarily framed as inherently better than low IC. Here, we explore associations between IC and performance on a novel problem-solving task, amongst 102 English 2- and 3-year-olds (Study 1) and 84 Swedish children, seen at 18-months and 4-years (Study 2). Generativity during problem-solving was negatively associated with IC, as measured by prohibition-compliance (Study 1, both ages, Study 2 longitudinally from 18-months). High parent-reported IC was associated with poorer overall problem-solving success, and greater perseveration (Study 1, 3-year-olds only). Benefits of high parent-reported IC on persistence could be accounted for by developmental level. No concurrent association was observed between problem-solving performance and IC as measured with a Delay-of-Gratification task (Study 2, concurrent associations at 4-years). We suggest that, for young children, high IC may confer burden on insight- and analytic-aspects of problem-solving.

The Sweet Spot: When Children’s Developing Abilities, Brains, and Knowledge Make Them Better Learners Than Adults

Cognitive development is marked by age-related improvements across a number of domains, as young children perform worse than their older counterparts on most tasks. However, there are cases in which young children, and even infants, outperform older children and adults. So when, and why, does being young sometimes confer an advantage? This article provides a comprehensive examination of the peculiar cases in which younger children perform better. First, we outline the specific instances in which younger is better across domains, including mastering language, using probabilistic information, detecting causal relations, remembering certain information, and even solving problems. We then examine how children’s reduced cognitive abilities, ongoing brain development, more limited prior knowledge, and heightened tendency to explore benefits their learning, reasoning, perception, and memory from a mechanistic perspective. We hold that considering all of these factors together is essential for understanding the ways in which children’s learning is unique and that science has much to learn from a careful consideration of childhood.

Children track probabilistic distributions of facial cues across individuals

Children face a difficult task in learning how to reason about other people's emotions. How intensely facial configurations are displayed can vary not only according to what and how much emotion people are experiencing, but also across individuals based on differences in personality, gender, and culture. To navigate these sources of variability, children may use statistical information about other's facial cues to make interpretations about perceived emotions in others. We examined this possibility by testing children's ability to adjust to differences in the intensity of facial cues across different individuals. In the present study, children (6- to 10-year-olds) categorized the information communicated by facial configurations of emotion varying continuously from "calm" to "upset," with differences in the intensity of each actor's facial movements. We found that children's threshold for categorizing a facial configuration as "upset" shifted depending on the statistical information encountered about each of the different individuals. These results suggest that children are able to track individual differences in facial behavior and use these differences to flexibly update their interpretations of facial cues associated with emotion. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Unlocking adults' implicit statistical learning by cognitive depletion

Human learning is supported by multiple neural mechanisms that maturate at different rates and interact in mostly cooperative but also sometimes competitive ways. We tested the hypothesis that mature cognitive mechanisms constrain implicit statistical learning mechanisms that contribute to early language acquisition. Specifically, we tested the prediction that depleting cognitive control mechanisms in adults enhances their implicit, auditory word-segmentation abilities. Young adults were exposed to continuous streams of syllables that repeated into hidden novel words while watching a silent film. Afterward, learning was measured in a forced-choice test that contrasted hidden words with nonwords. The participants also had to indicate whether they explicitly recalled the word or not in order to dissociate explicit versus implicit knowledge. We additionally measured electroencephalography during exposure to measure neural entrainment to the repeating words. Engagement of the cognitive mechanisms was manipulated by using two methods. In experiment 1 (n = 36), inhibitory theta-burst stimulation (TBS) was applied to the left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex or to a control region. In experiment 2 (n = 60), participants performed a dual working-memory task that induced high or low levels of cognitive fatigue. In both experiments, cognitive depletion enhanced word recognition, especially when participants reported low confidence in remembering the words (i.e., when their knowledge was implicit). TBS additionally modulated neural entrainment to the words and syllables. These findings suggest that cognitive depletion improves the acquisition of linguistic knowledge in adults by unlocking implicit statistical learning mechanisms and support the hypothesis that adult language learning is antagonized by higher cognitive mechanisms.

Prepulse Inhibition and P50 Suppression in Relation to Creativity and Attention: Dispersed Attention Beneficial to Quantitative but Not Qualitative Measures of Divergent Thinking

The current study investigated whether lower sensory and sensorimotor gating were related to higher levels of creativity and/or attentional difficulties in a natural population of primary school children (9- to 13-year-old). Gating abilities were measured with P50 suppression and prepulse inhibition of the startle reflex (PPI). The final sample included 65 participants in the P50 analyses and 37 participants in the PPI analyses. Our results showed that children with a high P50 amplitude to testing stimuli scored significantly higher on the divergent outcome measures of fluency and flexibility but not originality compared to children with a lower amplitude. No significant differences were found on any of the creativity measures when the sample was split on average PPI parameters. No significant differences in attention, as measured with a parent questionnaire, were found between children with low or high levels of sensory or sensorimotor gating. The data suggest that quantitative, but not qualitative measures of divergent thinking benefit from lower psychophysiological gating and that attentional difficulties stem from specific instead of general gating deficits. Future studies should take the effect of controlled attention into consideration.

Spontaneous and deliberate modes of creativity: Multitask eigen-connectivity analysis captures latent cognitive modes during creative thinking

Despite substantial progress in the quest of demystifying the brain basis of creativity, several questions remain open. One such issue concerns the relationship between two latent cognitive modes during creative thinking, i.e., deliberate goal-directed cognition and spontaneous thought generation. Although an interplay between deliberate and spontaneous thinking is often implicated in the creativity literature (e.g., dual-process models), a bottom-up data-driven validation of the cognitive processes associated with creative thinking is still lacking. Here, we attempted to capture the latent modes of creative thinking by utilizing a data-driven approach on a novel continuous multitask paradigm (CMP) that widely sampled a hypothetical two-dimensional cognitive plane of deliberate and spontaneous thinking in a single fMRI session. The CMP consisted of eight task blocks ranging from undirected mind wandering to goal-directed working memory task, while also included two widely-used creativity tasks, i.e., alternate uses task (AUT) and remote association task (RAT). Using eigen-connectivity (EC) analysis on the multitask whole-brain functional connectivity (FC) patterns, we embedded the multitask FCs into a low-dimensional latent space. The first two latent components, as revealed by the EC analysis, broadly mapped onto the two cognitive modes of deliberate and spontaneous thinking, respectively. Further, in this low-dimensional space, both creativity tasks were located in the upper right corner of high deliberate and spontaneous thinking (creative cognitive space). Neuroanatomically, the creative cognitive space was represented by not only increased intra-network connectivity within executive control and default mode network, but also by higher coupling between the two canonical brain networks. Further, individual differences reflected in the low-dimensional connectivity embeddings were related to differences in deliberate and spontaneous thinking abilities. Altogether, using a continuous multitask paradigm and a data-driven approach, we provide initial empirical evidence for the contribution of both deliberate and spontaneous modes of cognition during creative thinking.

How children learn to communicate discriminatively

How do children learn to communicate, and what do they learn? Traditionally, most theories have taken an associative, compositional approach to these questions, supposing children acquire an inventory of form-meaning associations, and procedures for composing / decomposing them; into / from messages in production and comprehension. This paper presents an alternative account of human communication and its acquisition based on the systematic, discriminative approach embodied in psychological and computational models of learning, and formally described by communication theory. It describes how discriminative learning theory offers an alternative perspective on the way that systems of semantic cues are conditioned onto communicative codes, while information theory provides a very different view of the nature of the codes themselves. It shows how the distributional properties of languages satisfy the communicative requirements described in information theory, enabling language learners to align their expectations despite the vastly different levels of experience among language users, and to master communication systems far more abstract than linguistic intuitions traditionally assume. Topics reviewed include morphological development, the acquisition of verb argument structures, and the functions of linguistic systems that have proven to be stumbling blocks for compositional theories: grammatical gender and personal names.

Examining the effects of time of day and sleep on generalization

Extracting shared structure across our experiences allows us to generalize our knowledge to novel contexts. How do different brain states influence this ability to generalize? Using a novel category learning paradigm, we assess the effect of both sleep and time of day on generalization that depends on the flexible integration of recent information. Counter to our expectations, we found no evidence that this form of generalization is better after a night of sleep relative to a day awake. Instead, we observed an effect of time of day, with better generalization in the morning than the evening. This effect also manifested as increased false memory for generalized information. In a nap experiment, we found that generalization did not benefit from having slept recently, suggesting a role for time of day apart from sleep. In follow-up experiments, we were unable to replicate the time of day effect for reasons that may relate to changes in category structure and task engagement. Despite this lack of consistency, we found a morning benefit for generalization when analyzing all the data from experiments with matched protocols (n = 136). We suggest that a state of lowered inhibition in the morning may facilitate spreading activation between otherwise separate memories, promoting this form of generalization.

Depression in the Direct Pathway of the Dorsomedial Striatum Permits the Formation of Habitual Action

In order to achieve optimal outcomes in an ever-changing environment, humans and animals generally manage their action control via either goal-directed action or habitual action. These two action strategies are thought to be encoded in distinct parallel circuits in the dorsal striatum, specifically, the posterior dorsomedial striatum (DMS) and the dorsolateral striatum (DLS), respectively. The striatum is primarily composed of two subtypes of medium spiny neurons (MSNs): the direct-pathway striatonigral and the indirect-pathway striatopallidal MSNs. MSN-subtype-specific synaptic plasticity in the DMS and the DLS has been revealed to underlie goal-directed action and habitual action, respectively. However, whether any MSN-subtype-specific synaptic plasticity in the DMS is associated with habitual action, and if so, whether the synaptic plasticity affects the formation of habitual action, are not known. This study demonstrates that postsynaptic depression in the excitatory synapses of the direct-pathway striatonigral MSNs in the DMS is formed after habit learning. Moreover, chemogenetically rescuing this depression compromises the acquisition, but not the expression, of habitual action. These findings reveal that an MSN-subtype-specific synaptic plasticity in the DMS affects habitual action and suggest that plasticity in the DMS as well as in the DLS contributes to the formation of habitual action.

The long-term associations between parental behaviors, cognitive function and brain activation in adolescence

Parenting behavior has a vital role in the development of the brain and cognitive abilities of offspring throughout childhood and adolescence. While positive and aggressive parenting behavior have been suggested to impact neurobiology in the form of abnormal brain activation in adolescents, little work has investigated the links between parenting behavior and the neurobiological correlates of cognitive performance during this age period. In the current longitudinal fMRI study, associations between parenting behaviors and cognitive performance and brain activation across mid- and late-adolescence were assessed. Observed measures of maternal aggressive and positive behavior were recorded in early adolescence (12 years) and correlated with fMRI activation and in-scanner behavioral scores on the multi-source interference task (MSIT) during mid- (16 years; 95 participants) and late-adolescence (19 years; 75 participants). There was a significant reduction in inhibitory-control-related brain activation in posterior parietal and cingulate cortices as participants transitioned from mid- to late-adolescence. Positive maternal behavior in early-adolescence was associated with lower activation in the left parietal and DLPFC during the MSIT in mid-adolescence, whereas maternal aggressive behavior was associated with longer reaction time to incongruent trials in late-adolescence. The study supports the notion that maternal behavior may influence subsequent neurocognitive development during adolescence.

A description-experience gap in statistical intuitions: Of smart babies, risk-savvy chimps, intuitive statisticians, and stupid grown-ups

Comparison of different lines of research on statistical intuitions and probabilistic reasoning reveals several puzzling contradictions. Whereas babies seem to be intuitive statisticians, surprisingly capable of statistical learning and inference, adults' statistical inferences have been found to be inconsistent with the rules of probability theory and statistics. Whereas researchers in the 1960s concluded that people's probability updating is "conservatively" proportional to normative predictions, probability updating research in the 1970s suggested that people are incapable of following Bayes's rule. And whereas animals appear to be strikingly risk savvy, humans often seem "irrational" when dealing with probabilistic information. Drawing on research on the description-experience gap in risky choice, we integrate and systematize these findings from disparate fields of inquiry that have, to date, operated largely in parallel. Our synthesis shows that a key factor in understanding inconsistencies in statistical intuitions research is whether probabilistic inferences are based on symbolic, abstract descriptions or on the direct experience of statistical information. We delineate this view from other conceptual accounts, consider potential mechanisms by which attributes of first-hand experience can facilitate appropriate statistical inference, and identify conditions under which they improve or impair probabilistic reasoning. To capture the full scope of human statistical intuition, we conclude, research on probabilistic reasoning across the lifespan, across species, and across research traditions must bear in mind that experience and symbolic description of the world may engage systematically distinct cognitive processes.

Children perform extensive information gathering when it is not costly

Humans often face decisions where little is known about the choice options. Gathering information prior to making a choice is an important strategy to improve decision making under uncertainty. This is of particular importance during childhood and adolescence, when knowledge about the world is still limited. To examine how much information youths gather, we asked 107 children (8-9 years, N = 30), early (12-13 years, N = 41) and late adolescents (16-17 years, N = 36) to perform an information sampling task. We find that children gather significantly more information before making a decision compared to adolescents, but only if it does not come with explicit costs. Using computational modelling, we find that this is because children have reduced subjective costs for gathering information. Our findings thus demonstrate how children overcome their limited knowledge and neurocognitive constraints by deploying excessive information gathering, a developmental feature that could inform aberrant information gathering in psychiatric disorders.

Learning in Infancy Is Active, Endogenously Motivated, and Depends on the Prefrontal Cortices

A common view of learning in infancy emphasizes the role of incidental sensory experiences from which increasingly abstract statistical regularities are extracted. In this view, infant brains initially support basic sensory and motor functions, followed by maturation of higher-level association cortex. Here, we critique this view and posit that, by contrast and more like adults, infants are active, endogenously motivated learners who structure their own learning through flexible selection of attentional targets and active interventions on their environment. We further argue that the infant brain, and particularly the prefrontal cortex (PFC), is well equipped to support these learning behaviors. We review recent progress in characterizing the function of the infant PFC, which suggests that, as in adults, the PFC is functionally specialized and highly connected. Together, we present an integrative account of infant minds and brains, in which the infant PFC represents multiple intrinsic motivations, which are leveraged for active learning.

Children's automatic evaluation of self-generated actions is different from adults

Performance monitoring (PM) is central to learning and decision making. It allows individuals to swiftly detect deviations between actions and intentions, such as response errors, and adapt behavior accordingly. Previous research showed that in adult participants, error monitoring is associated with two distinct and robust behavioral effects. First, a systematic slowing down of reaction time speed is typically observed following error commission, which is known as post-error slowing (PES). Second, response errors have been reported to be automatically evaluated as negative events in adults. However, it remains unclear whether (1) children process response errors as adults do (PES), (2) they also evaluate them as negative events, and (3) their responses vary according to the pedagogy experienced. To address these questions, we adapted a simple decision-making task previously validated in adults to measure PES as well as the affective processing of response errors. We recruited 8- to 12-year-old children enrolled in traditional (N = 56) or Montessori (N = 45) schools, and compared them to adults (N = 46) on the exact same task. Results showed that children processed correct actions as positive events, and that adults processed errors as negative events. By contrast, PES was similarly observed in all groups. Moreover, the former effect was observed in traditional schoolchildren, but not in Montessori schoolchildren. These findings suggest that unlike PES, which likely reflects an age-invariant attention orienting toward response errors, their affective processing depends on both age and pedagogy.

Semantics-weighted lexical surprisal modeling of naturalistic functional MRI time-series during spoken narrative listening

Probabilistic language models are increasingly used to provide neural representations of linguistic features under naturalistic settings. Word surprisal models can be applied to continuous fMRI recordings during task-free listening of narratives, to detect regions linked to language prediction and comprehension. Here, to this purpose, a novel semantics-weighted lexical surprisal is applied to naturalistic fMRI data. FMRI was performed at 3 Tesla in 31 subjects during task-free listening to a 12-minute audiobook played in both original and word-reversed (control) version. Lexical-only and semantics-weighted lexical surprisal models were estimated for the original and control word series. The two series were alternatively chosen to build the predictor of interest in the first-level general linear model and were compared in the second-level (group) analysis. The addition of the surprisal predictor to the stimulus-related predictors significantly improved the fitting of the neural signal. In average, the semantics-weighted model yielded lower surprisal values and, in some areas, better fitting of the fMRI data compared to the lexical-only model. The two models produced both overlapping and distinct activations: while lexical-only surprisal activated secondary auditory areas in the superior temporal gyri and the cerebellum, semantics-weighted surprisal additionally activated the left inferior frontal gyrus. These results confirm the usefulness of surprisal models in the naturalistic fMRI analysis of linguistic processes and suggest that the use of semantic information may increase the sensitivity of a probabilistic language model in higher-order language-related areas, with possible implications for future naturalistic fMRI studies of language under normal and (clinically or pharmacologically) modified conditions.

Childhood as a solution to explore-exploit tensions

I argue that the evolution of our life history, with its distinctively long, protected human childhood, allows an early period of broad hypothesis search and exploration, before the demands of goal-directed exploitation set in. This cognitive profile is also found in other animals and is associated with early behaviours such as neophilia and play. I relate this developmental pattern to computational ideas about explore-exploit trade-offs, search and sampling, and to neuroscience findings. I also present several lines of empirical evidence suggesting that young human learners are highly exploratory, both in terms of their search for external information and their search through hypothesis spaces. In fact, they are sometimes more exploratory than older learners and adults. This article is part of the theme issue 'Life history and learning: how childhood, caregiving and old age shape cognition and culture in humans and other animals'.

How does the brain learn environmental structure? Ten core principles for understanding the neurocognitive mechanisms of statistical learning

Despite a growing body of research devoted to the study of how humans encode environmental patterns, there is still no clear consensus about the nature of the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning statistical learning nor what factors constrain or promote its emergence across individuals, species, and learning situations. Based on a review of research examining the roles of input modality and domain, input structure and complexity, attention, neuroanatomical bases, ontogeny, and phylogeny, ten core principles are proposed. Specifically, there exist two sets of neurocognitive mechanisms underlying statistical learning. First, a "suite" of associative-based, automatic, modality-specific learning mechanisms are mediated by the general principle of cortical plasticity, which results in improved processing and perceptual facilitation of encountered stimuli. Second, an attention-dependent system, mediated by the prefrontal cortex and related attentional and working memory networks, can modulate or gate learning and is necessary in order to learn nonadjacent dependencies and to integrate global patterns across time. This theoretical framework helps clarify conflicting research findings and provides the basis for future empirical and theoretical endeavors.

Percolating ideas: The effects of caffeine on creative thinking and problem solving

Caffeine is the most widely consumed psychotropic drug in the world, with numerous studies documenting the effects of caffeine on people's alertness, vigilance, mood, concentration, and attentional focus. The effects of caffeine on creative thinking, however, remain unknown. In a randomized placebo-controlled between-subject double-blind design the present study investigated the effect of moderate caffeine consumption on creative problem solving (i.e., convergent thinking) and creative idea generation (i.e., divergent thinking). We found that participants who consumed 200 mg of caffeine (approximately one 12 oz cup of coffee, n = 44), compared to those in the placebo condition (n = 44), showed significantly enhanced problem-solving abilities. Caffeine had no significant effects on creative generation or on working memory. The effects remained after controlling for participants' caffeine expectancies, whether they believed they consumed caffeine or a placebo, and changes in mood. Possible mechanisms and future directions are discussed.

The sense of should: A biologically-based framework for modeling social pressure

What is social pressure, and how could it be adaptive to conform to others' expectations? Existing accounts highlight the importance of reputation and social sanctions. Yet, conformist behavior is multiply determined: sometimes, a person desires social regard, but at other times she feels obligated to behave a certain way, regardless of any reputational benefit-i.e. she feels a sense of should. We develop a formal model of this sense of should, beginning from a minimal set of biological premises: that the brain is predictive, that prediction error has a metabolic cost, and that metabolic costs are prospectively avoided. It follows that unpredictable environments impose metabolic costs, and in social environments these costs can be reduced by conforming to others' expectations. We elaborate on a sense of should's benefits and subjective experience, its likely developmental trajectory, and its relation to embodied mental inference. From this individualistic metabolic strategy, the emergent dynamics unify social phenomenon ranging from status quo biases, to communication and motivated cognition. We offer new solutions to long-studied problems (e.g. altruistic behavior), and show how compliance with arbitrary social practices is compelled without explicit sanctions. Social pressure may provide a foundation in individuals on which societies can be built.

TDCS to the right anterior temporal lobe facilitates insight problem-solving

Problem-solving is essential for advances in cultural, social, and scientific knowledge. It is also one of the most challenging cognitive processes to facilitate. Some problem-solving is deliberate, but frequently people solve problems with a sudden insight, also known as a Eureka or "Aha!" moment. The advantage of solving problems via insight is that these solutions are more accurate, relying on a unique pattern of neural activity, compared to deliberative strategies. The right Anterior Temporal Lobe (rATL), putatively involved in semantic integration, is distinctively activated when people experience an insight. The rATL may contribute to the recognition of distant semantic relations that support insight solutions, although fMRI and EEG evidence for its involvement is, by nature, correlational. In this study, we investigate if focal sub-threshold neuromodulation to the rATL facilitates insight problem-solving. In three different groups, using a within- and between-subjects design, we tested the causal role of this brain region in problem-solving, by applying High Definition Transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to the rATL (active and sham condition) or the left frontopolar region while participants attempted to solve Compound Remote Associates problems before, during and after stimulation. Participants solved a higher percentage of problems, overall, and specifically by insight when they received rATL stimulation, compared to pre-stimulation, and compared to sham and left frontopolar stimulation. These results confirm the crucial role played by the rATL in insight problem-solving.

Reinforcement learning across development: What insights can we draw from a decade of research?

The past decade has seen the emergence of the use of reinforcement learning models to study developmental change in value-based learning. It is unclear, however, whether these computational modeling studies, which have employed a wide variety of tasks and model variants, have reached convergent conclusions. In this review, we examine whether the tuning of model parameters that govern different aspects of learning and decision-making processes vary consistently as a function of age, and what neurocognitive developmental changes may account for differences in these parameter estimates across development. We explore whether patterns of developmental change in these estimates are better described by differences in the extent to which individuals adapt their learning processes to the statistics of different environments, or by more static learning biases that emerge across varied contexts. We focus specifically on learning rates and inverse temperature parameter estimates, and find evidence that from childhood to adulthood, individuals become better at optimally weighting recent outcomes during learning across diverse contexts and less exploratory in their value-based decision-making. We provide recommendations for how these two possibilities - and potential alternative accounts - can be tested more directly to build a cohesive body of research that yields greater insight into the development of core learning processes.

Beyond executive functions, creativity skills benefit academic outcomes: Insights from Montessori education

Studies have shown scholastic, creative, and social benefits of Montessori education, benefits that were hypothesized to result from better executive functioning on the part of those so educated. As these previous studies have not reported consistent outcomes supporting this idea, we therefore evaluated scholastic development in a cross-sectional study of kindergarten and elementary school-age students, with an emphasis on the three core executive measures of cognitive flexibility, working memory update, and selective attention (inhibition). Two hundred and one (201) children underwent a complete assessment: half of the participants were from Montessori settings, while the other half were controls from traditional schools. The results confirmed that Montessori participants outperformed peers from traditional schools both in academic outcomes and in creativity skills across age groups and in self-reported well-being at school at kindergarten age. No differences were found in global executive functions, except working memory. Moreover, a multiple mediations model revealed a significant impact of creative skills on academic outcomes influenced by the school experience. These results shed light on the possibly overestimated contribution of executive functions as the main contributor to scholastic success of Montessori students and call for further investigation. Here, we propose that Montessori school-age children benefit instead from a more balanced development stemming from self-directed creative execution.

Functional connectivity in human auditory networks and the origins of variation in the transmission of musical systems

Music producers, whether original composers or performers, vary in their ability to acquire and faithfully transmit music. This form of variation may serve as a mechanism for the emergence of new traits in musical systems. In this study, we aim to investigate whether individual differences in the social learning and transmission of music relate to intrinsic neural dynamics of auditory processing systems. We combined auditory and resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with an interactive laboratory model of cultural transmission, the signaling game, in an experiment with a large cohort of participants (N=51). We found that the degree of interhemispheric rs-FC within fronto-temporal auditory networks predicts—weeks after scanning—learning, transmission, and structural modification of an artificial tone system. Our study introduces neuroimaging in cultural transmission research and points to specific neural auditory processing mechanisms that constrain and drive variation in the cultural transmission and regularization of musical systems.

Reconsidering retrieval effects on adult regularization of inconsistent variation in language

The phenomenon of regularization - learners imposing systematicity on inconsistent variation in language input - is complex. Studies show that children are more likely to regularize than adults, but adults will also regularize under certain circumstances. Exactly why we see the pattern of behaviour that we do is not well understood, however. This paper reports on an experiment investigating whether it is possible to induce regularization in adults by varying the conditions of learning and/or testing in ways that made retrieval more difficult, something predicted by Hudson Kam and Newport (2009). The data show that interfering with learning does not lead to regularization, in accord with the findings of Perfors (2012), but that interfering with retrieval at test does, although only to a small degree.

Treatment and outcomes at Takiwasi Center, a Peruvian therapeutic community: identifying patient-related indicators

Purpose

Substance abuse is a major public health concern, with over millions of people suffering from it worldwide. Although there is an abundance of treatment options, many of these rehabilitative trajectories are subject to “drop-out”. In addition, “drop-out” is a significant risk factor for relapse. There is an urgent demand for effective treatment, which would enable patients to reduce abuse and prevent relapse. Takiwasi is an addiction treatment centre that combines traditional Amazonian plant medicine with conventional western medicine and psychotherapy. The purpose of this paper is to explore whether socio-demographics factors, such as education level and occupation, psychiatric comorbidities and primary drug use, are associated with treatment non-completion of Ayahuasca (AYA)-assisted addiction therapy.

Design/methodology/approach

Data on the first treatment episode of 121 patients were collected from the patient database from the years 2012 to 2017. To determine whether there is an association between the variables of interest and treatment non-completion, a χ2 analysis and a logistic regression analysis were performed.

Findings

Of the 121 patients analysed, 48.2 per cent completed their treatment, whilst 51.8 per cent did not. Students compared to those who are employed showed significantly higher odds for treatment non-completion (p=0.006; OR=3.7; 95% CI=1.5–9.6). Other variables in the multivariable analysis showed no significant relationship with treatment non-completion. While several limitations restricted the study, the findings suggest that the AYA-assisted treatment in Takiwasi may benefit from additional support for patients who are students. Moreover, it is advised to conduct more long-term follow-up of patients in order to gain better insight into the outcome of treatment at an AYA-assisted treatment centre.

Originality/value

It appears that AYA-assisted therapy in a therapeutic community is a feasible type of treatment for addiction, for which further studies should elucidate the role of motivation in relation to socio-demographic factors and type of addiction in the risk of treatment non-completion.

Unity and diversity of executive functions in creativity

Increasing evidence suggests that executive functions (EFs) - a set of general-purpose control processes that regulate thoughts and behaviors - are relevant for creativity. However, EF is not a unitary process, and it remains unclear which specific EFs are involved. The present study examined the association between the three EFs, both uniquely (EF-Specific) and together (Common EF), and three measures of creativity. Participants (N = 47) completed a divergent thinking test, and self-reported their real-life creative accomplishments. A subset of participants indicated their involvement in the artistic or information technology (IT) professions. Results indicated that fluency (but not originality) of divergent thinking was uniquely predicted by working memory Updating. Better response Inhibition predicted higher number of real-world artistic creative achievements. Involvement in the artistic (versus IT) professions was associated with better Common EF, and with enhanced mental set Shifting abilities. Results demonstrate that different EFs predict creativity depending on its operational definition.

The computational basis of following advice in adolescents

Advice taking helps one to quickly acquire knowledge and make decisions. This age-comparative study (in children [8- to 10-year-olds], adolescents [13- to 15-year-olds], and adults [18- to 22-year-olds]) investigated developmental differences in how advice, experience, and exploration influence learning. The results showed that adolescents were initially easily swayed to follow peer advice but also switched more rapidly to exploring alternatives like children. Whereas adults stayed with the advice over the task, adolescents put more weight on their own experience compared with adults. A social learning model showed that although social influence most strongly affects adolescents' initial expectations (i.e., their priors), adolescents showed higher exploration and discovered the other good option in the current task. Thus, our model resolved the apparently conflicting findings of adolescents being more and less sensitive to peer influence and provides novel insights into the dynamic interaction between social and individual learning.