We aimed at investigating whether formal schooling and literacy favor progress in verbal serial-order short-term memory (STM). In Experiment 1, we presented children varying on age, school level, and socioeconomic background with a serial-order reconstruction task and observed differences related to both age and school level. Two subsequent experiments aimed at separating schooling- and literacy-related effects from age-related ones. In Experiment 2 we compared, on the one hand, performance of children of similar age but different school levels and, on the other hand, performance of children of same school level but different ages. We observed a schooling effect but no age effect on serial-order reconstruction: the youngest first-graders outperformed age-matched kindergartners but performed similarly as older first-graders of the same literacy level. Furthermore, children's literacy abilities were strongly correlated to their serial-order reconstruction performance, even after controlling for the effects of non-verbal reasoning and vocabulary. In Experiment 3 we examined low socio-economic background adults presenting varying (correlated) levels of schooling and literacy: some had attended school in childhood for only a few years and were either illiterate or very poor readers, whereas others had attended school for at least 12 years. In addition to serial-order memory, item STM was assessed by a delayed single nonword repetition task. The groups differed on both STM tasks, which both correlated with their literacy abilities. Thus, literacy and schooling do not impact only order memory, but more generally verbal STM. Moreover, comparison between the adults' and children's data strongly suggests that it is schooling and/or literacy rather than age per se that matters for serial-order memory.

Ce travail de these visait a examiner dans quelle mesure et comment l’apprentissage de la lecture et de l’ecriture (i.e., la litteratie) peut influencer la memoire a court terme verbale, cette fonction cognitive qui nous permet de maintenir temporairement des informations verbales. De plus en plus de donnees suggerent, en effet, que cette acquisition faconne profondement certains circuits cerebraux, notamment ceux impliques dans le traitement du langage parle. Apprendre a lire conduit au developpement de la conscience phonemique, ainsi qu’a l’emergence de representations orthographiques intimement liees aux representations phonologiques. Ces deux elements, qui semblent mener a des representations langagieres mieux specifiees et plus stables, pourraient influencer les performances en memoire a court terme verbale, ceci meme en modalite auditive. L’Etude I suggere que cette memoire a court terme est influencee par les experiences scolaires vecues en 1ere annee primaire. L’acquisition du langage ecrit pourrait etre un facteur de progres en memoire. Les Etudes II et III examinaient le role des connaissances orthographiques sur le rappel seriel immediat de listes de mots parles, chez des enfants et des adultes, respectivement. Dans la premiere, un effet de la similarite orthographique a ete observe sur le rappel de l’information « item », avec des mots phonologiquement similaires : les listes de mots dont la rime etait differente sur le plan orthographique etaient mieux rappelees que les listes dont la rime etait orthographiquement similaire. La seconde etude a mene a un effet benefique de l’inconsistance orthographique sur le rappel de l’information item. L’objectif de l’Etude IV etait de tester l’hypothese selon laquelle les items pour lesquels un individu dispose de representations orthographiques bien specifiees, quoique nouvellement acquises, sont mieux rappeles dans une tâche de rappel seriel immediat que les items a l’orthographe incertaine ou inconnue. Notre experience ne nous a pas permis de valider cette hypothese. Enfin, l’ Etude V avait pour but d’examiner le role des connaissances orthographiques sur le rappel libre, une tâche dans laquelle l’ordre de rappel n’a pas d’importance. En accord avec notre hypothese, nous avons observe un meilleur rappel pour les listes de mots dont la rime differait sur le plan orthographique, comparees aux listes de mots dont la rime orthographique etait identique. Dans l’ensemble, les resultats suggerent que les connaissances orthographiques peuvent contribuer au maintien de l’information relative a l’item, mais n’ont pas d’effet sur le maintien de l’ordre seriel de la sequence. D’autres etudes sont necessaires pour confirmer et preciser les effets orthographiques observes.

Many experimental studies have investigated the relationship between the acquisition of reading and working memory in a unidirectional way, attempting to determine to what extent individual differences in working memory can predict reading achievement. In contrast, very little attention has been dedicated to the converse possibility that learning to read shapes the development of verbal memory processes. In this paper, we present available evidence that advocates a more prominent role for reading acquisition on verbal working memory and then discuss the potential mechanisms of such literacy effects. First, the early decoding activities might bolster the development of subvocal rehearsal, which, in turn, would enhance serial order performance in immediate memory tasks. In addition, learning to read and write in an alphabetical system allows the emergence of phonemic awareness and finely tuned phonological representations, as well as of orthographic representations. This could improve the quality, strength, and precision of lexical representations, and hence offer better support for the temporary encoding of memory items and/or for their retrieval.

Many experimental studies have investigated the relationship between the acquisition of reading and working memory in a unidirectional way, attempting to determine to what extent individual differences in working memory can predict reading achievement. In contrast, very little attention has been dedicated to the converse possibility that learning to read shapes the development of verbal memory processes. In this paper, we present available evidence that advocates a more prominent role for reading acquisition on verbal working memory and then discuss the potential mechanisms of such literacy effects. First, the early decoding activities might bolster the development of subvocal rehearsal, which, in turn, would enhance serial order performance in immediate memory tasks. In addition, learning to read and write in an alphabetical system allows the emergence of phonemic awareness and finely tuned phonological representations, as well as of orthographic representations. This could improve the quality, strength, and precision of lexical representations, and hence offer better support for the temporary encoding of memory items and/or for their retrieval.

Many studies of immediate serial recall (ISR) of verbal items have shown that the short-term storage of item information is supported by the activation of language knowledge stored in long-term memory, such as the lexical and semantic representations (for a review, see Majerus, 2009, in A. Thorn (Ed.), New York: Psychology Press). Similarly, as phonological and orthographic memory representations are highly connected in literate people, orthographic knowledge may influence memory performance in purely auditory ISR tasks. In adult participants, Pattamadilok, Lafontaine, Morais, and Kolinsky (2010, Language and Speech) showed that inter-item orthographic dissimilarity helps to reduce the deleterious effect of phonological similarity. They observed that, in a seven-word auditory ISR task, compared to words that shared neither the phonological nor the orthographic rhyme, performance was less affected when words rhymed but had different spellings than when they both rhymed and had the same spelling. However, the recall benefit due to orthographic dissimilarity was only observed at positions four to six of the word list. The present study provides converging children data. Using an ISR task of auditory five-word lists in 3rd grade children (mean age: 8.4 years old), we observed that inter-item orthographic dissimilarity (e.g., the list sport, bord, corps, nord, store, all ending with the same rhyme vs. the list passe, chasse, tasse, brasse, classe) assists the recall of item information (i.e., the proportion of items recalled independently of serial position) but not the recall of order information (i.e., absolute accuracy divided by item accuracy). In addition, only performance in the condition of phonological similarity and orthographic dissimilarity was significantly correlated with performance in the spelling task on the items used in the ISR, suggesting that the higher item accuracy obtained in this condition was partly due to the use of spelling knowledge. Consistently, irregular word reading (which is generally viewed as reflecting orthographic processing abilities) was highly correlated with the size of the orthographic effect. It worth noting that children did not notice that the spellings of the rhyming words could be dissimilar or not. These findings thus suggest that, in case of phonological similarity, spelling knowledge is automatically used to support the maintain of auditory items in memory, an effect that depends on the level of reading and spelling abilities.

It is well established that mood influences many cognitive processes, such as learning and executive functions. Although statistical learning is assumed to be part of our daily life, as mood does, the influence of mood on statistical learning has never been investigated before. In the present study, a sad vs. neutral mood was induced to the participants through the listening of stories while they were exposed to a stream of visual shapes made up of the repeated presentation of four triplets, namely sequences of three shapes presented in a fixed order. Given that the inter-stimulus interval was held constant within and between triplets, the only cues available for triplet segmentation were the transitional probabilities between shapes. Direct and indirect measures of learning taken either immediately or 20 minutes after the exposure/mood induction phase revealed that participants learned the statistical regularities between shapes. Interestingly, although participants from the sad and neutral groups performed similarly in these tasks, subjective measures (confidence judgments taken after each trial) revealed that participants who experienced the sad mood induction showed increased conscious access to their statistical knowledge. These effects were not modulated by the time delay between the exposure/mood induction and the test phases. These results are discussed within the scope of the robustness principle and the influence of negative affects on processing style.

A strong association between on the one hand short-term and working memory (STM, WM) capacities and on the other hand reading achievement is well established in children, and the former are often considered to be predictive of the latter (e.g., Gathercole & Baddeley, 1993; Martinez Perez et al., 2012). Although few studies have investigated the inverse relationship, adults who remained illiterate for socio-economic raisons display poorer STM and WM compared to literate and ex-illiterate adults (e.g., Ardila et al., 2010; Kosmidis et al., 2011). These data point to an interactive process with feedback effects from literacy on memory processes and/or representations. Therefore, our main objective is to investigate to what extent and how literacy acquisition affects memory. To this end, using both a cut-off design (comparing children of similar reading levels but different ages and children of similar ages but different reading levels) and training studies in which we will make children acquire new orthographic representations of pseudowords, we will examine, mainly in normally reading children (but also by comparing literate to illiterate adults), the various, non-mutually exclusive, mechanisms of such feedback effects. Indeed, in addition to (i) offering support from orthographic representations (Pattamadilok et al., 2010), literacy may (ii) help to develop less episodic, more abstract phonological representations; (iii) help to develop more detailed phonological representations; (v) improve chunking or other structuring processes; (v) improve serial order processing; (vi) improve executive control processes (attention, flexibility, inhibition) involved in STM and WM tasks.

More than any other forms of art, music seems able to induce very promptly strong emotional reactions in the listener. Thus, music could be a valuable tool to investigate the relationship between emotion and attention. Some authors attribute to music important adaptive functions of social cohesion and communication; in this perspective, “musical emotions” could elicit attentional biases similar to those elicited by biologically relevant emotional stimuli (e.g., snake, face, prosody). The objective of the present study was thus to investigate the potential influence of emotions conveyed by music on spatial attention. Using a cross-modal emotional cueing task, we examined how specific emotions expressed in short melodies unknown to participants and used as cues modulate spatial attentional engagement. Results revealed a modulation of covert attention by musical emotions. Specifically, we found validity effects with sad and peaceful music, and an overall slowdown effect on responses times with threatening melodies. We propose that harmonious music (with slow and regular tempo) might quickly induce an emotional state favorable to the spontaneous maintenance of attention in direction of the musical source, whereas threatening music might put the body in a state of alert, looking for the occurrence of an imminent danger, at the expense of the effective realization of the task. Finally, response times to valid and invalid happy trials were similar, suggesting that attention was focused neither toward the musical source, nor in its opposite direction, but rather distributed: happy music might thus lead to an opening of the attentional field.