Two experiments investigated the effects of task instructions and environmental setting on undergraduate students’ multiple document reading strategies and their use of information in written messages. Participants studied a set of four digital documents under a moderate time constraint in order to write a message either for an academic or a personal purpose. Half of the participants completed the task in a university room, whereas the other half completed the task from home. Working from home for a personal purpose decreased time on task and participants’ attention to the most informative documents. Students working for a personal purpose were more likely to refer to themselves and to articulate an opinion on the topic of interest in their messages, whereas those working for an academic purpose made more references to the information sources. Experiment 2 replicated most of the findings with a modified procedure in which participants wrote their messages from memory. In addition, Experiment 2 found that students working for an academic purpose and/or at the university had a more accurate memory for who said what in the documents. The results support a purposeful approach of reading whereby self-regulation is governed by readers’ understanding of explicit and implicit task demands.

The objective of this study was to develop and assess an instructional approach to teaching purposeful reading comprehension strategies to vocational school students. These students specialize for an occupational field, but they often experience difficulties with school tasks that involve reading and using written documents. Grounded in a definition of reading that emphasizes goal-setting and task management, a set of 10 explicit instruction workshops focused on purposeful reading strategies was co-designed with a group of vocational high school teachers from various disciplines. A different group of teachers was then trained by the research team and implemented the workshops in their regular classrooms. The effectiveness of the approach was tested using a quasi-experimental pre-test/training/post-test design involving an experimental group (N = 17 classes and 241 students) and a control group (N = 15 classes and 174 students). The intervention led to improvements on several indicators of purposeful reading proficiency, with pre-post-test comparisons suggesting particularly notable benefits for the students who initially exhibited greater difficulties. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories of reading comprehension, instructional approaches and researcher-teacher collaboration.

This study explores the relationships between sixth graders' motivation for purposeful reading, their task understanding skills, and their comprehension of written texts. More specifically, we investigated the role of students' understanding of reading tasks as a mediator of the relationships between reading self-concept, intrinsic reading motivation, reading value, and comprehension performance. Two hundred thirty-one sixth graders completed a purposeful reading motivation questionnaire, four tasks assessing their understanding of reading tasks, and four tasks assessing their comprehension of written texts. Intrinsic motivation and self-concept predicted comprehension performance but did not predict task-modeling skills. Mediation analyses showed that task-modeling skills only mediated the relationship between reading value and comprehension performance. The contributions of various dimensions of adolescents' motivation for reading and their task-modeling skills to their reading comprehension are discussed in light of current models of purposeful reading.

Over the past four decades, point-light displays (PLD) have been integrated into psychology and psychophysics, providing a valuable means to probe human perceptual skills. Leveraging the inherent kinematic information and controllable display parameters, researchers have utilized this technique to examine the mechanisms involved in learning and rehabilitation. However, classical PLD generation methods (e.g., motion capture) are difficult to apply for behavior analysis in real-world situations, such as patient care or sports activities. Therefore, there is a demand for automated and affordable tools that enable efficient and real-world-compatible generation of PLDs for psychological research. In this paper, we propose SmartDetector, a new artificial intelligence (AI)-based tool for automatic PLD creation from RGB videos. To evaluate humans’ perceptual skills for processing PLD building with SmartDetector, 126 participants were randomly assigned to recognition, discrimination, or detection tasks. Results demonstrated that, irrespective of the task, PLDs generated by SmartDetector exhibited commendable perceptual performance in terms of accuracy and response times compared to literature findings. Moreover, to enhance usability and broaden accessibility, we developed an intuitive web interface for our method, making it available to a wider audience. The resulting application is available at https://plavimop.prd.fr/index.php/en/automatic-creation-pld . SmartDetector offers interesting possibilities for using PLD in research and makes the use of PLD more accessible for nonacademic applications.

Online reading for academic purposes is a complex and challenging activity that involves analysing task requirements, assessing information needs, accessing relevant contents, and evaluating the relevance and reliability of information given the task at hand. The present study implemented and tested an analytical approach to strategy training that combined a detailed, step-by-step presentation of each strategy with the integration of various strategies across modules and practice tasks. One hundred sixty-seven university students were assigned to either a treatment or a control condition. The training program was implemented as part of a digital literacy course. Instructors received background information and instructional materials prior to the beginning of the term. The intervention improved students’ performance on a set of search and evaluation tasks representative of the target skills, although to varying extent. The impact was higher for evaluation than for search skills, in terms of accuracy and quality of students’ justifications. The data provides initial evidence that an analytical approach may foster university students’ use of advanced reading strategies in the context of online reading. Implications for instruction and future research are discussed.

Recent definitions of reading emphasize the need of considering the context in which this activity is carried out. Within this perspective, the present study seeks to examine the influence of two reading situations (to read a text knowing that it will - or not - remain available when answering comprehension questions) and their consequent reading strategies (integral vs. selective) on 13-14-year-old teenagers' reading comprehension performance, and to examine the differential role of executive functions in these two situations. The results show that text availability interacts with text properties (single vs. multiple) and question type (low-vs. high-level). In addition, executive skills seem to be involved preferen-tially in situations where readers keep the texts available when answering questions, sugges-ting that such a situation indeed reflects a more strategic reading behaviour.

It was more than 45 years ago that Gunnar Johansson invented the point-light display technique. This showed for the first time that kinematics is crucial for action recognition, and that humans are very sensitive to their conspecifics’ movements. As a result, many of today’s researchers use point-light displays to better understand the mechanisms behind this recognition ability. In this paper, we propose PLAViMoP, a new database of 3D point-light displays representing everyday human actions (global and fine-motor control movements), sports movements, facial expressions, interactions, and robotic movements. Access to the database is free, at https://plavimop.prd.fr/en/motions . Moreover, it incorporates a search engine to facilitate action retrieval. In this paper, we describe the construction, functioning, and assessment of the PLAViMoP database. Each sequence was analyzed according to four parameters: type of movement, movement label, sex of the actor, and age of the actor. We provide both the mean scores for each assessment of each point-light display, and the comparisons between the different categories of sequences. Our results are discussed in the light of the literature and the suitability of our stimuli for research and applications.

Episodic memory decline with aging may be due to an age-related deficit in encoding processing, older adults having increasing difficulty to self-initiate encoding strategies that support later retrieval. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the present study explored for the first time the neural correlates of successful encoding in a resource-dependent episodic memory task, in which participants had to self-initiate processes at both encoding and retrieval. At the behavioral level, results confirm the better memory performance of young than older adults. Comparing the neural activity elicited by studied items that were and were not subsequently recalled (Subsequent Memory Effect, SME), electrophysiological data revealed that younger adults showed a significant and sustained SME, shifting from parietal to frontal areas, suggesting that they self-initiated deep encoding strategies. In older adults, the duration of brain activity was shorter and located more in the parietal than frontal areas, suggesting that they used shallow rather than deep processes. Consistent with the hypothesis of a deficit in self initiated strategies in aging, our findings suggest that when older adults are faced with a difficult memory task (no encoding support and no cue at retrieval), they engage fewer elaborative strategies than young adults, resulting in impaired episodic memory performance.

Les définitions récentes de la lecture insistent sur la nécessaire prise en compte du contexte dans lequel se réalise cette activité. Dans cette perspective, l’objectif de cette étude était d’étudier l’influence de deux situations de lecture (lire un texte en sachant que celui-ci restera – ou non – disponible au moment de répondre à des questions de compréhension) et des stratégies de lecture qui en découlent (intégrale vs . sélective) sur les performances en compréhension d’adolescents de 13-14 ans, et d’examiner le rôle différencié des fonctions exécutives dans ces deux situations. Les résultats montrent que la disponibilité des textes interagit avec les propriétés des textes (uniques vs . multiples) et des questions (bas vs . haut niveau). Par ailleurs, les compétences exécutives semblent préférentiellement impliquées dans les situations où le lecteur garde les textes à disposition au moment de répondre aux questions, suggérant qu’une telle situation relève d’une activité de lecture plus stratégique.

The present study examined the evolution of the behavioral performance, subjectively perceived difficulty, and hemodynamic activity of the prefrontal cortex as a function of cognitive load during two different cognitive tasks tapping executive functions. Additionally, it investigated the relationships between these behavioral, subjective, and neuroimaging data. Nineteen right-handed young adults (18–22 years) were scanned using continuous-wave functional near-infrared spectroscopy during the performance of n-back and random number generation tasks in three cognitive load conditions. Four emitter and four receptor optodes were fixed bilaterally over the ventrolateral and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices to record the hemodynamic changes. A self-reported scale measured the perceived difficulty. The findings of this study showed that an increasing cognitive load deteriorated the behavioral performance and increased the perceived difficulty. The hemodynamic activity increased parametrically for the three cognitive loads of the random number generation task and in a two-back and three-back compared to a one-back condition. In addition, the hemodynamic activity was specifically greater in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex than in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex for both cognitive tasks (random number generation and n-back tasks). Finally, the results highlighted some links between cerebral oxygenation and the behavioral performance, but not the subjectively perceived difficulty. Our results suggest that cognitive load affects the executive performance and perceived difficulty and that fNIRS can be used to specify the prefrontal cortex’s implications for executive tasks involving inhibition and working memory updating.

Many studies have demonstrated the crucial role of vocabulary in predicting reading performance in general. More recent work has indicated that one particular facet of vocabulary (its depth) is more closely related to language comprehension, especially inferential comprehension. On this basis, we developed a training application to specifically improve vocabulary depth. The objective of this study was to test the effectiveness of a mobile application designed to improve vocabulary depth. The effectiveness of this training was examined on 3rd and 4th grade children's vocabulary (breadth and depth), decoding and comprehension performances. A randomized waiting-list control paradigm was used in which an experimental group first received the intervention during the first 4 weeks (between pretest and post-test1), thereafter, a waiting control group received the training for the next 4 weeks (between postest1 and posttest2). Results showed that the developed application led to significant improvements in terms of vocabulary depth performance, as well as a significant transfer effect to reading comprehension. However, we did not observe such a beneficial effect on either vocabulary breadth or written word identification. These results are discussed in terms of the links between vocabulary depth and comprehension, and the opportunities the app presents for remedying language comprehension deficits in children.

The present study aimed to examine the effects of chronological age and cardiorespiratory fitness (CRF) on cognitive performance and prefrontal cortex activity, and to test the compensation-related utilization of neural circuits hypothesis (CRUNCH). A total of 19 young adults (18⁻22 years) and 37 older ones (60⁻77 years) with a high or low CRF level were recruited to perform a working memory updating task under three different cognitive load conditions. Prefrontal cortex hemodynamic responses were continuously recorded using functional near-infrared spectroscopy, and behavioral performances and perceived difficulty were measured. Results showed that chronological age had deleterious effects on both cognitive performance and prefrontal cortex activation under a higher cognitive load. In older adults, however, higher levels of CRF were related to increased bilateral prefrontal cortex activation patterns that allowed them to sustain better cognitive performances, especially under the highest cognitive load. These results are discussed in the light of the neurocognitive CRUNCH model.

The study of biological point-light displays (PLDs) has fascinated researchers for more than 40 years. However, the mechanisms underlying PLD perception remain unclear, partly due to difficulties with precisely controlling and transforming PLD sequences. Furthermore, little agreement exists regarding how transformations are performed. This article introduces a new free-access program called PLAViMoP (Point-Light Display Visualization and Modification Platform) and presents the algorithms for PLD transformations actually included in the software. PLAViMoP fulfills two objectives. First, it standardizes and makes clear many classical spatial and kinematic transformations described in the PLD literature. Furthermore, given its optimized interface, PLAViMOP makes these transformations easy and fast to achieve. Overall, PLAViMoP could directly help scientists avoid technical difficulties and make possible the use of PLDs for nonacademic applications.

The objective of this study was to examine age-related effects on behavioral performance and metabolic activity of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in a dual-task paradigm involving fine-motor control and executive-function control. Thirty-one adults (20 ± 1.1 years) and 33 older adults (70.7 ± 5.1 years) performed, separately and then concurrently, a modified Fitts task on targets of different sizes (Index of Difficulty: ID = 3; 4; 5 bits) and the random number generation task (RNG). Movement time (MT) and count score (CS) were the dependent variables for the modified Fitts task and the RNG task, respectively. Relative changes in concentrations of oxyhemoglobin [HbO2] and deoxyhemoglobin [HHb] were recorded continuously on the left and right PFCs, with near-infrared spectroscopy (Oxymon MkIII-Artinis) with an acquisition rate of 10 Hz. Our results showed large motor dual-task cost in seniors compared to young adults. Regarding hemodynamic activity, we have observed a prominent activation of the PFC in the young adults compared to the seniors during the dual-task condition.

We studied the processes involved in synthesis writing, focusing on planning, editing and self-regulation strategies. The aims of the study were a) to analyse the temporal distribution of cognitive strategies and self-regulation across the different phases of writing, b) to identify different writing approaches (i.e., profiles), and c) to establish the relationship between writing behavior and writing performance. Twenty-seven humanities students, who were 23 years of age on average, were asked to produce a synthesis. The methodology combined videotaped observations, a think aloud protocol, and an assessment of writing performance, and specific instruments were constructed to collect the data. Algorithms were also calculated to determine the transitions between different types of writing behavior. Results showed that the nature, frequency, and duration of planning, editing, and self-regulation strategies varied according to the phase (prewriting or writing), and the most remarkable changes occurred in the final period of writing. Moreover, although the college students’ functioning generally reflected a novice approach, there were significant differences between the three writer profiles we found, namely precise transcriber , active reviser , and spontaneous writer . Finally, writing performance was positively and significantly correlated with writing strategies such as taking notes and reading drafts.

Plusieurs etudes ont mis en evidence que l’activite physique (AP) peut contrecarrer les effets deleteres du vieillissement cerebral (voir Kelly et al., 2014). Selon l’hypothese neurotrophique, l’AP participerait au maintien de la sante cerebrale en permettant une liberation du facteur neurotrophique derive du cerveau (BDNF). Cependant, le polymorphisme Val66Met du gene du BDNF (BDNF Val66Met) regule la quantite de BDNF liberee dans le cerveau et semble etre implique dans les effets deleteres du vieillissement. Il a ete montre que l’AP magnifie les effets de l’allele Val sur la memoire episodique chez des seniors (Canivet et al., 2015). De ce fait, nous pouvons penser que l’AP pourrait favoriser l’effet de ce polymorphisme sur une fonction cognitive particulierement affectee par l’AP et l’âge, l’inhibition (Gajewski & Falkenstein, 2016). Nous faisons l’hypothese que les sujets actifs Val homozygotes auront de meilleures performances d’inhibition que leurs homologues inactifs.