Jacques Pesnot Lerousseau, Céline Hidalgo, Stéphane Roman, & Daniele Schön

Early sensory deprivation allows assessing the extent of reorganisation of cognitive functions, well beyond sensory processing. As such, it is a good model to explore the links between sensory experience and cognitive functions. One of these functions, statistical learning – the ability to extract and use regularities present in the environment – is suspected to be impaired in prelingually deaf children with a cochlear implant. However, empirical evidence supporting this claim is very scarce and studies have reported contradictory results. This might be because previous studies have tested statistical learning only in the visual modality and did not make clear distinctions between multiple types of statistical regularities. To overcome these problems, we designed a modified serial reaction time task where cochlear implanted children and normal hearing children had to react to auditory sequences that embed multiple statistical regularities, namely transition probabilities of 0th, 1st or 2nd order. We compared the reaction times of the children with the output of a simple computational model that learns transition probabilities. First, 6–12 years old children were able to learn 0th and 1st order transition probabilities but not 2nd order ones. Second, there were no differences between cochlear implanted children and their normal hearing peers. These results indicate that auditory statistical learning is preserved in congenitally deaf children with cochlear implants. This suggests in turn that early auditory deprivation might not be crucially detrimental for the normal development of statistical learning.

Ladislas Nalborczyk, Ursula Debarnot, Marieke Longcamp, Aymeric Guillot, & F.-Xavier Alario

Front. Hum. Neurosci. 16:804832 — @HAL

Covert speech is accompanied by a subjective multisensory experience with auditory and kinaesthetic components. An influential hypothesis states that these sensory percepts result from a simulation of the corresponding motor action that relies on the same internal models recruited for the control of overt speech. This simulationist view raises the question of how it is possible to imagine speech without executing it. In this perspective, we discuss the possible role(s) played by motor inhibition during covert speech production. We suggest that considering covert speech as an inhibited form of overt speech maps naturally to the purported progressive internalization of overt speech during childhood. We further argue that the role of motor inhibition may differ widely across different forms of covert speech (e.g., condensed vs. expanded covert speech) and that considering this variety helps reconciling seemingly contradictory findings from the neuroimaging literature.

Estelle Hervé, Giovanni Mento, Béatrice Desnous, & Clément François

Despite shared procedures with adults, electroencephalography (EEG) in early development presents many specificities that need to be considered for good quality data collection. In this paper, we provide an overview of the most representative early cognitive developmental EEG studies focusing on the specificities of this neuroimaging technique in young participants, such as attrition and artifacts. We also summarize the most representative results in developmental EEG research obtained in the time and time-frequency domains and use more advanced signal processing methods. Finally, we briefly introduce three recent standardized pipelines that will help promote replicability and comparability across experiments and ages. While this paper does not claim to be exhaustive, it aims to give a sufficiently large overview of the challenges and solutions available to conduct robust cognitive developmental EEG studies.

Audrey Bürki-Foschini, F.-Xavier Alario, & Shravan Vasishth

In the picture-word interference paradigm, participants name pictures while ignoring a written or spoken distractor word. Naming times to the pictures are slowed down by the presence of the distractor word. The present study investigates in detail the impact of distractor and target word properties on picture naming times, building on the seminal study by Miozzo and Caramazza (2003) “When more is less: A counterintuitive effect of distractor frequency in the picture-word interference paradigm. Journal of Experimental Psychology. General.” We report the results of several Bayesian meta-analyses, based on 26 datasets. These analyses provide estimates of effect sizes and their precision for several variables and their interactions. They show the reliability of the distractor frequency effect on picture naming latencies (latencies decrease as the frequency of the distractor increases) and demonstrate for the first time the impact of distractor length, with longer naming latencies for trials with longer distractors. Moreover, distractor frequency interacts with target word frequency to predict picture naming latencies. The methodological and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

Laure Tosatto, Guillem Bonafos, Jean-Baptiste Melmi, & Arnaud Rey

Laura Ordonez Magro, Joël Fagot, Jonathan Grainger, & Arnaud Rey

Learn Behav (2022)  —@HAL

It is nowadays well-established that decay and interference are two main causes of forgetting. In the present study, we specifically focus on the impact of interference on memory forgetting. To do so, we tested Guinea baboons (Papio papio) on a visuo-motor adaptation of the Serial Reaction Time task in which a target sequence is repeated, and a random sequence is interposed between repetitions, a similar situation as the one used in the Hebb repetition paradigm. In this task, one three-item sequence, the repeated sequence, was presented every second trial and interleaved with random sequences. Interference was implemented by using random sequences containing one item that was also part of the repeated sequence. In a first condition, the overlapping item was located at the same position as the repeated sequence. In a second condition, the overlapping item was located at one of the two other positions. In a third condition, there was no overlap between repeated and random sequences. Contrary to previous findings, our results reveal similar learning slopes across all three conditions, suggesting that interference did not affect sequence learning in the conditions tested. Findings are discussed in the light of previous research on sequence learning and current models of memory and statistical learning.