A multidimensional evaluation of the benefits of an ecologically realistic training based on pretend play for preschoolers' cognitive control and self-regulation: From behavior to the underlying theta neuro-oscillatory activity.

To what extent can cognitive control, self-regulation, and the underlying midfrontal theta oscillatory activity of preschool children be modified by an ecologically realistic training based on pretend play? To answer this question, 70 children aged 4-6 years (37 boys) were assigned to a training group or a control group using a pairing randomization procedure. Children were administered 20 play sessions over 10 weeks. Benefits were evaluated with a pre-post design. The intervention helped children to engage more in self-regulation within the training activities. However, the intervention did not promote self-regulation outside of the training context, nor did it influence cognitive control and theta activity. These results provide a better understanding of the limitations of an ecologically realistic approach to cognitive control training.

The role of midfrontal theta oscillations across the development of cognitive control in preschoolers and school-age children.

The development of cognitive control enables children to better resist acting based on distracting information that interferes with the current action. Cognitive control improvement serves different functions that differ in part by the type of interference to resolve. Indeed, resisting to interference at the task-set level or at the response-preparation level is, respectively, associated with cognitive flexibility and inhibition. It is, however, unknown whether the same neural mechanism underlies these two functions across development. Studies in adults have revealed the contribution of midfrontal theta (MFT) oscillations in interference resolution. This study investigated whether MFT is involved in the resolution of different types of interference in two age groups identified as corresponding to different latent structures of executive functions. Preschool (4-6 years) and school children (6-8 years) were tested with a task involving interference at the response level and/or the task-set level while (electroencephalogram) EEG was recorded. Behaviorally, response time and accuracy were affected by task-set. Both age groups were less accurate when the interference occurred at the task-set level and only the younger group showed decreased accuracy when interference was presented at the response-preparation level. Furthermore, MFT power was increased, relative to the baseline, during the resolution of both types of interference and in both age groups. These findings suggest that MFT is involved in immature cognitive control (i.e., preschool and school-ages), by orchestrating its different cognitive processes, irrespective of the interference to resolve and of the level of cognitive control development (i.e., the degree of differentiation of executive functions).

Individual and dyadic rope turning as a window into social coordination.

The spontaneous and intentional movement coordination between peoples is well understood. Less is known about such interactions when the coordination is subordinate to the task and when the task involves, next to vision, mechanically induced haptic and kinesthetic coupling between dyadic partners. We therefore investigated dyadic jump rope turning. Fifteen dyadic pairs conjointly turned a jump rope to which five markers were equidistantly attached, and whose movements were recorded in 3D. In addition, each participant turned one side of the rope while the other side was quasi-fixed in an individual baseline condition. The participants' goal was to turn the rope regularly and smoothly. Individual spontaneous turning frequencies differed substantially across participants. Yet, dyadic pairs spontaneously turned the rope at a common frequency, indicative of frequency entrainment. The dyadic rope rotations were less variable despite weaker between near-hand marker coordination than the individual rope rotations, and the degree of performance improvement was most pronounced for participants who were paired with a partner who performed better in the individual condition. The direction and relative strength of the coupling between partners varied substantially across dyads, but the degree of coupling asymmetry had no substantial effect on the rope tuning quality. The absolute degree in which dyadic partners adjusted to each other, however, scaled moderately with their turning performance. Although the individual performances did not predict the dyadic performances, the difference in individual performance between dyadic partners had some predictive value for the dyadic performance. In combination, these results indicate that the partners were functionally adapting to each other in order to satisfy the task goal and suggest that the relative performance differences rather than the individual performances has predictive value for conjoint action.

Neural coding of prior expectations in hierarchical intention inference.

The ability to infer other people's intentions is crucial for successful human social interactions. Such inference relies on an adaptive interplay of sensory evidence and prior expectations. Crucially, this interplay would also depend on the type of intention inferred, i.e., on how abstract the intention is. However, what neural mechanisms adjust the interplay of prior and sensory evidence to the abstractness of the intention remains conjecture. We addressed this question in two separate fMRI experiments, which exploited action scenes depicting different types of intentions (Superordinate vs. Basic; Social vs. Non-social), and manipulated both prior and sensory evidence. We found that participants increasingly relied on priors as sensory evidence became scarcer. Activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) reflected this interplay between the two sources of information. Moreover, the more abstract the intention to infer (Superordinate > Basic, Social > Non-Social), the greater the modulation of backward connectivity between the mPFC and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), resulting in an increased influence of priors over the intention inference. These results suggest a critical role for the fronto-parietal network in adjusting the relative weight of prior and sensory evidence during hierarchical intention inference.

Reduced sensitivity to social priors during action prediction in adults with autism spectrum disorders.

An extensive amount of evidence has documented a diminished ability to predict and understand other people's action in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Recently, two theoretical accounts, the "Hypo-priors" and the "Aberrant precision" hypotheses, have suggested that attenuated Bayesian priors or an imbalance of the precision ascribed to sensory evidence relative to prior expectations may be responsible for the atypical perceptual experience and difficulties with action understanding in ASD. In the present study, we aimed to directly investigate whether difficulties in the appreciation of others' intentions can be accounted for by abnormal interaction between these two types of information: (i) the sensory evidence conveyed by movement kinematics, and (ii) the observer's expectations, acquired from past experience or derived from prior knowledge. To test this hypothesis, we contrasted the ability to infer Non-Social and Social intentions in adults with and without ASD, using a series of tasks in which both sensory evidence and prior expectations were manipulated. The results showed that attenuated effect of prior expectations in ASD individuals does not result from a generalized impairment in mentalizing, but one confined to social intentions. Attenuated priors in the social domain predicted the severity of clinical symptoms in the area of social interaction. Importantly, however, we found that reduced priors in the social domain could be compensated by ASD through observational learning, i.e. through deriving statistical regularities from observed behaviours. This capacity to balance reduced social expectations by learning inversely correlated with the severity of repetitive and stereotyped behaviours. Collectively, these findings suggest that adults with ASD exhibit a disturbance in the inferential mechanism that integrates sensory evidence into prior beliefs to produce accurate inferences about other people's intentions.

Responsibility and the sense of agency enhance empathy for pain.

Being held responsible for our actions strongly determines our moral judgements and decisions. This study examined whether responsibility also influences our affective reaction to others' emotions. We conducted two experiments in order to assess the effect of responsibility and of a sense of agency (the conscious feeling of controlling an action) on the empathic response to pain. In both experiments, participants were presented with video clips showing an actor's facial expression of pain of varying intensity. The empathic response was assessed with behavioural (pain intensity estimation from facial expressions and unpleasantness for the observer ratings) and electrophysiological measures (facial electromyography). Experiment 1 showed enhanced empathic response (increased unpleasantness for the observer and facial electromyography responses) as participants' degree of responsibility for the actor's pain increased. This effect was mainly accounted for by the decisional component of responsibility (compared with the execution component). In addition, experiment 2 found that participants' unpleasantness rating also increased when they had a sense of agency over the pain, while controlling for decision and execution processes. The findings suggest that increased empathy induced by responsibility and a sense of agency may play a role in regulating our moral conduct.

Mentalizing under influence: abnormal dependence on prior expectations in patients with schizophrenia.

An impaired ability to appreciate other people's mental states is a well-established and stable cognitive deficit in schizophrenia, which might explain some aspects of patients' social dysfunction. Yet, despite a wealth of literature on this topic, the basic mechanisms underlying these impairments are still poorly understood, and their links with the clinical dimensions of schizophrenia remain unclear. The present study aimed to investigate the extent to which patients' impaired ability to appreciate other people's intentions (known as mentalizing) may be accounted for by abnormal interaction between the two types of information that contribute to this ability: (i) the sensory evidence conveyed by movement kinematics; and (ii) the observer's prior expectations. We hypothesized that this is not a generalized impairment, but one confined to certain types of intentions. To test this assumption, we designed four tasks in which participants were required to infer either: (i) basic intentions (i.e. the simple goal of a motor act); (ii) superordinate intentions (i.e. the general goal of a sequence of motor acts); (iii) social basic; or (iv) social superordinate intentions (i.e. simple or general goals achieved within the context of a reciprocal interaction). In each of these tasks, both prior expectations and sensory information were manipulated. We found that patients correctly inferred non-social, basic intentions, but experienced difficulties when inferring non-social superordinate intentions and both basic and superordinate social intentions. These poor performances were associated with two abnormal patterns of interaction between prior expectations and sensory evidence. In the non-social superordinate condition, patients relied heavily on their prior expectations, while disregarding sensory evidence. This pattern of interaction predicted the severity of 'positive' symptoms. Social conditions prompted exactly the opposite pattern of interaction: patients exhibited weaker dependence on prior expectations while relying strongly on sensory evidence, and this predicted the severity of 'negative' symptoms. We suggest both these patterns can be accounted for by a disturbance in the Bayesian inferential mechanism that integrates sensory evidence (conveyed by movement kinematics) into prior beliefs (about others' mental states and attitudes) to produce accurate inferences about other people's intentions.

Impaired hierarchical control within the lateral prefrontal cortex in schizophrenia.

BACKGROUND: In schizophrenia, disturbances of cognitive control have been associated with impaired functional specialization within the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC), but little is known about the functional interactions between specialized LPFC subregions. Here, we addressed this question with a recent model that describes the LPFC functioning as a cascade of control processes along a rostrocaudal axis, whereby anterior frontal regions influence the processing in posterior frontal regions to guide action selection on the basis of the temporal structure of information. METHODS: We assessed effective connectivity within the rostrocaudal axis of the LPFC by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging in 15 schizophrenic patients and 14 matched healthy control subjects with structural equation modeling and psychophysiological interactions. RESULTS: In healthy subjects, activity in the left caudal LPFC regions was under the influence of left rostral LPFC regions when controlling information conveyed by past events. By contrast, schizophrenic patients failed to demonstrate significant effective connectivity from rostral to caudal LPFC regions in both hemispheres. CONCLUSIONS: The hierarchical control along the rostrocaudal axis of the LPFC is impaired in schizophrenia. This provides the first evidence of a top-down functional disconnection within the LPFC in this disorder. This disruption of top-down connectivity from rostral to caudal LPFC regions observed in patients might affect their ability to select the appropriate sets of stimulus-response associations in the caudal LPFC on the basis of information conveyed by past events. This impaired hierarchical control within the LPFC could result from poorly encoded contextual information due to abnormal computations in the caudal LPFC.

What are they up to? The role of sensory evidence and prior knowledge in action understanding.

Explaining or predicting the behaviour of our conspecifics requires the ability to infer the intentions that motivate it. Such inferences are assumed to rely on two types of information: (1) the sensory information conveyed by movement kinematics and (2) the observer's prior expectations--acquired from past experience or derived from prior knowledge. However, the respective contribution of these two sources of information is still controversial. This controversy stems in part from the fact that "intention" is an umbrella term that may embrace various sub-types each being assigned different scopes and targets. We hypothesized that variations in the scope and target of intentions may account for variations in the contribution of visual kinematics and prior knowledge to the intention inference process. To test this hypothesis, we conducted four behavioural experiments in which participants were instructed to identify different types of intention: basic intentions (i.e. simple goal of a motor act), superordinate intentions (i.e. general goal of a sequence of motor acts), or social intentions (i.e. intentions accomplished in a context of reciprocal interaction). For each of the above-mentioned intentions, we varied (1) the amount of visual information available from the action scene and (2) participant's prior expectations concerning the intention that was more likely to be accomplished. First, we showed that intentional judgments depend on a consistent interaction between visual information and participant's prior expectations. Moreover, we demonstrated that this interaction varied according to the type of intention to be inferred, with participant's priors rather than perceptual evidence exerting a greater effect on the inference of social and superordinate intentions. The results are discussed by appealing to the specific properties of each type of intention considered and further interpreted in the light of a hierarchical model of action representation.

Organization of cognitive control within the lateral prefrontal cortex in schizophrenia.

CONTEXT: Cognitive control is highly affected in schizophrenia, but its overall functional architecture remains poorly understood. A recent study demonstrated that, in healthy subjects, cognitive control is functionally organized within the lateral prefrontal cortex (LPFC) as a cascade of representations ranging from premotor to anterior LPFC regions according to stimuli, the present perceptual context, and the temporal episode in which stimuli occur. OBJECTIVE: To determine the functional hierarchical organization of cognitive control within the LPFC in patients with schizophrenia. DESIGN: Case-control study. SETTING: Hospital-based research units. PARTICIPANTS: Fifteen schizophrenic patients and 14 controls. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Behavioral performance and regional brain activity as measured by functional magnetic resonance imaging during a task, varying the amount of information conveyed by episodic and contextual signals. RESULTS: In patients and healthy controls, activity in caudal LPFC regions varied as episodic and contextual signals, whereas rostral LPFC regions only exhibited an episodic effect. However, patients made more errors than controls when information conveyed by contextual and episodic signals increased. These impairments were related to hypoactivation in caudal LPFC regions and hyperactivation in rostral LPFC regions, respectively. Activation in caudal LPFC regions negatively correlated with the disorganization syndrome score of patients. CONCLUSIONS: In schizophrenic patients, the architecture of cognitive control follows the cascading organization from rostral LPFC regions to caudal LPFC and premotor regions depending on the temporal framing of action and events. We found, however, that immediate contextual signals insufficiently bias the caudal LPFC activity required to select the appropriate behavioral representation. This specific deficit could thus alter the internal consistency of schizophrenic patients' behavior. To compensate for this weakening of contextual influence, schizophrenic patients may inefficiently use temporal episodic information through higher activation in rostral LPFC regions.

The architecture of cognitive control in schizophrenia.

Executive dysfunctions have long been considered a common feature of schizophrenia. However, due to their extreme heterogeneity, it is not clear whether these impairments take place at a particular level of executive functioning or non-specifically affect various aspects of behavioural control. To answer this question, we used an experimental paradigm based upon a multistage model of prefrontal executive function. This model postulates that cognitive control is organized in three hierarchically ordered control processes, operating with respect to the perceptual context (sensory and contextual controls) or the temporal episode in which the person is acting (episodic control). Twenty-four patients with schizophrenia and 24 non-psychiatric controls participated in two distinct experiments designed to separately assess each of these three levels of control. The results indicate that both sensory and episodic dimensions of cognitive control were spared in schizophrenic patients, but that they showed great difficulty in contextual conditions, as the selection of the appropriate response among competitive ones required taking into account information related to perceptual context. Contextual control can be considered as a set of executive processes mediating the hierarchical organization of behaviour. Patients' deficit in cognitive control therefore reflects a specific problem in the hierarchical control of action, leading to the selection of inappropriate behavioural representations for ongoing action plans. We also showed that this impairment was a good predictor of disorganization syndrome scores, suggesting that these clinical manifestations might result from a deficit in the combination or selection of hierarchically organized action representations.

The angular gyrus computes action awareness representations.

Involvement of the right inferior parietal area in action awareness was investigated while taking into account differences in the conscious experiences of one's own actions; especially, the awareness that an intended action is consistent with movement consequences and the awareness of the authorship of the action (i.e., the sense of agency). We hypothesized that these experiences are both associated with processes implemented in inferior parietal cortex, specifically, right angular gyrus (Ag). Two blood-oxygenation-level-dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging studies employed a novel delayed visual feedback technique to distinguish the neural correlates of these 2 forms of action awareness. We showed that right Ag is associated with both awareness of discrepancy between intended and movement consequences and awareness of action authorship. We propose that this region is involved in higher-order aspects of motor control that allows one to consciously access different aspects of one's own actions. Specifically, this region processes discrepancies between intended action and movement consequences in such a way that these will be consciously detected by the subject. This joint processing is at the core of the various experiences one uses to interpret an action.

Neural correlates of action attribution in schizophrenia.

Patients with first-rank symptoms (FRS) of schizophrenia do not experience all of their actions and personal states as their own. FRS may be associated with an impaired ability to correctly attribute an action to its origin. In the present study, we examined regional cerebral blood flow (rCBF) with positron emission tomography during an action-attribution task in a group of patients with FRS. We used a device previously used with healthy subjects that allows the experimenter to modulate the subject's degree of movement control (and thus action attribution) of a virtual hand presented on a screen. In healthy subjects, the activity of the right angular gyrus and the insula cortex appeared to be modulated by the subject's degree of movement control of the virtual hand. In the present study, the schizophrenic patients did not show this pattern. We found an aberrant relationship between the subject's degree of control of the movements and rCBF in the right angular gyrus and no modulation in the insular cortex. The implications of these results for understanding pathological conditions such as schizophrenia are discussed.

Actions or hand-object interactions? Human inferior frontal cortex and action observation.

Cells in macaque ventral premotor cortex (area F5c) respond to observation or production of specific hand-object interactions. Studies in humans associate the left inferior frontal gyrus, including putative F5 homolog pars opercularis, with observing hand actions. Are these responses related to the realized goal of a prehensile action or to the observation of dynamic hand movements? Rapid, event-related fMRI was used to address this question. Subjects watched static pictures of the same objects being grasped or touched while performing a 1-back orienting task. In all 17 subjects, bilateral inferior frontal cortex was differentially activated in response to realized goals of observed prehensile actions. Bilaterally, precentral gyrus was most frequently activated (82%) followed by pars triangularis (73%) and pars opercularis (65%).