Teaching the Science in Neuroscience to Protect From Neuromyths: From Courses to Fieldwork.

In recent decades, Cognitive Neuroscience has evolved from a rather arcane field trying to understand how the brain supports mental activities, to one that contributes to public policies. In this article, we focus on the contributions from Cognitive Neuroscience to Education. This line of research has produced a great deal of information that can potentially help in the transformation of Education, promoting interventions that help in several domains including literacy and math learning, social skills and science. The growth of the Neurosciences has also created a public demand for knowledge and a market for neuro-products to fulfill these demands, through books, booklets, courses, apps and websites. These products are not always based on scientific findings and coupled to the complexities of the scientific theories and evidence, have led to the propagation of misconceptions and the perpetuation of neuromyths. This is particularly harmful for educators because these misconceptions might make them abandon useful practices in favor of others not sustained by evidence. In order to bridge the gap between Education and Neuroscience, we have been conducting, since 2013, a set of activities that put educators and scientists to work together in research projects. The participation goes from discussing the research results of our projects to being part and deciding aspects of the field interventions. Another strategy consists of a course centered around the applications of Neuroscience to Education and their empirical and theoretical bases. These two strategies have to be compared to popularization efforts that just present Neuroscientific results. We show that the more the educators are involved in the discussion of the methodological bases of Neuroscientific knowledge, be it in the course or as part of a stay, the better they manage the underlying concepts. We argue that this is due to the understanding of scientific principles, which leads to a more profound comprehension of what the evidence can and cannot support, thus shielding teachers from the false allure of some commercial neuro-products. We discuss the three approaches and present our efforts to determine whether they lead to a strong understanding of the conceptual and empirical base of Neuroscience.

Approximate number and approximate time discrimination each correlate with school math abilities in young children.

What is the relationship between our intuitive sense of number (e.g., when estimating how many marbles are in a jar), and our intuitive sense of other quantities, including time (e.g., when estimating how long it has been since we last ate breakfast)? Recent work in cognitive, developmental, comparative psychology, and computational neuroscience has suggested that our representations of approximate number, time, and spatial extent are fundamentally linked and constitute a "generalized magnitude system". But, the shared behavioral and neural signatures between number, time, and space may alternatively be due to similar encoding and decision-making processes, rather than due to shared domain-general representations. In this study, we investigate the relationship between approximate number and time in a large sample of 6-8 year-old children in Uruguay by examining how individual differences in the precision of number and time estimation correlate with school mathematics performance. Over four testing days, each child completed an approximate number discrimination task, an approximate time discrimination task, a digit span task, and a large battery of symbolic math tests. We replicate previous reports showing that symbolic math abilities correlate with approximate number precision and extend those findings by showing that math abilities also correlate with approximate time precision. But, contrary to approximate number and time sharing common representations, we find that each of these dimensions uniquely correlates with formal math: approximate number correlates more strongly with formal math compared to time and continues to correlate with math even when precision in time and individual differences in working memory are controlled for. These results suggest that there are important differences in the mental representations of approximate number and approximate time and further clarify the relationship between quantity representations and mathematics.

Influence of Interpretation Aids on Attentional Capture, Visual Processing, and Understanding of Front-of-Package Nutrition Labels.

OBJECTIVE: To study the influence of 2 interpretational aids of front-of-package (FOP) nutrition labels (color code and text descriptors) on attentional capture and consumers' understanding of nutritional information. DESIGN: A full factorial design was used to assess the influence of color code and text descriptors using visual search and eye tracking. PARTICIPANTS: Ten trained assessors participated in the visual search study and 54 consumers completed the eye-tracking study. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: In the visual search study, assessors were asked to indicate whether there was a label high in fat within sets of mayonnaise labels with different FOP labels. In the eye-tracking study, assessors answered a set of questions about the nutritional content of labels. ANALYSIS: The researchers used logistic regression to evaluate the influence of interpretational aids of FOP nutrition labels on the percentage of correct answers. Analyses of variance were used to evaluate the influence of the studied variables on attentional measures and participants' response times. RESULTS: Response times were significantly higher for monochromatic FOP labels compared with color-coded ones (3,225 vs 964 ms; P < .001), which suggests that color codes increase attentional capture. The highest number and duration of fixations and visits were recorded on labels that did not include color codes or text descriptors (P < .05). The lowest percentage of incorrect answers was observed when the nutrient level was indicated using color code and text descriptors (P < .05). CONCLUSIONS AND IMPLICATIONS: The combination of color codes and text descriptors seems to be the most effective alternative to increase attentional capture and understanding of nutritional information.

Influence of cognitive style on information processing and selection of yogurt labels: Insights from an eye-tracking study.

Cognitive styles are characteristic and stable ways in which people acquire, organize and use information for solving problems and making decisions. Field dependence/independence is one of the most studied cognitive styles. Field independent subjects are characterized by having less difficulty in separating information from its contextual surroundings and being less likely to be influenced by external cues than field dependent individuals. The present work aimed at studying the influence of field dependence/independence cognitive style on consumers' visual processing and choice of yogurt labels. One hundred and thirty three consumers completed a choice conjoint task. They were asked to select their preferred yogurt label from each of 16 pairs of labels. While they completed the task their eye movements were recorded using an eye-tracker. Then, consumers were asked to complete the Group Embedded Figure Test to determine their cognitive style. Consumers were divided into two groups with different cognitive styles: 58% of the sample was characterized as field dependent and 42% as field independent. When making their choices, field dependent consumers tended to engage in less thoughtful information processing than field independent consumers and they made fewer fixations on traditional nutritional information. Besides, cognitive style significantly affected the relative importance of fat and sugar content on consumer choices and modulated the influence of the traffic light system. Field dependent consumers gave less importance to the nutritional composition of the yogurts than field independent consumers for selecting their preferred label. Results from this work suggest that studying the psychological underpinnings of consumers' decision making process when selecting food products has a great potential to contribute to a better understanding of how eating patterns and consumer preferences are shaped.

How do design features influence consumer attention when looking for nutritional information on food labels? Results from an eye-tracking study on pan bread labels.

The aim of this work was to evaluate consumer visual processing of food labels when evaluating the salt content of pan bread labels and to study the influence of label design and nutritional labelling format on consumer attention. A total of 16 pan bread labels, designed according to a full factorial design, were presented to 52 participants, who were asked to decide whether the sodium content of each label was medium or low, while their eye movements were recorded using an eye tracker. Results showed that most participants looked at nutrition labels and the traffic light system to conclude on the salt content of the labels. However, the average percentage of participants who looked at the actual sodium content was much lower. Nutrition information format affected participants' processing of nutrition information. Among other effects, the inclusion of the traffic light system increased participants' attention towards some kind of nutrition information and facilitated its processing, but not its understanding.

Temporal dynamics of action contribution to object categorization

La presentación de un gesto de agarre facilita el reconocimiento de un objeto presentado a continuación cuando el gesto es coherente con el objeto a identificar. Este efecto se explica habitualmente como el resultado de la integración de dos procesos visuales diferentes: procesos descriptivos asociados a áreas visuales ventrales y procesos a cargo de la computación de las métricas de acción en áreas visuales dorsales. Con el objetivo de explorar la dinámica temporal de esta interacción llevamos a cabo un experimento en el que los participantes categorizaron objetos precedidos por gestos de agarre congruentes y no congruentes luego de distintos intervalos temporales (ISI). Los gestos de agarre y los objetos se presentaron separados por cinco intervalos entre estímulos distintos (ISI): 0, 250, 500, 1,000, y 2,000 ms. Los resultados mostraron respuestas significativamente más cortas para los casos congruentes en las condiciones de ISI de 250 y 500 ms. Sin embargo, no se encontró efecto para las restantes condiciones de ISI (0, 1,000 y 2,000). Estos resultados sugieren que la contribución automática de áreas visuomotoras dorsales para el reconocimiento de objetos es más robusta hasta 500 ms después de la desaparición del estímulo facilitador, y que la identificación de objetos es facilitada por un gesto manual de agarre en el marco de una ventana temporal concreta (250–500 ms)(AU)

The presentation of a hand grasp facilitates the recognition of subsequent objects when the grasp is coherent with the object to be identified. This outcome is usually explained as the integration of two different processes: descriptive visual processes in ventral visual areas and processes in charge of the computations of action metrics in dorsal visual regions. With the aim to explore the temporal dynamics of this interaction, we conducted an experiment in which participants categorized objects preceded by congruent and incongruent hand grasp gestures under different interstimulus interval (ISI) conditions. Hand grasp gestures and target objects were separated by five different interstimulus intervals (ISI): 0, 250, 500, 1000, and 2000 ms. Results showed significant shorter response times for congruent trials than for incongruent trials for ISI conditions of 250 and 500 ms. However, no effect was found for the other ISIs (0, 1,000 and 2,000). These results suggest that the contribution of automatically driven visuomotor dorsal areas in object recognition is stronger up to 500 ms after prime offset, and that object identification is facilitated by hand gesture primes just inside this time window (250–500 ms)(AU)

Attentional capture and understanding of nutrition labelling: a study based on response times.

The aim of the present work was to assess the influence of nutrition information format on attentional capture and consumers' understanding. Sixteen labels of two products (yoghurt and pan bread) were designed following a four 2-level factors full factorial design with the following variables: label background design, type of product, nutrition information format and traffic light system. The labels were presented to 178 consumers, who were asked to decide whether the fat/sodium content of each yoghurt/pan bread label was medium or low. Participant responses and reaction times were recorded. Results showed that type of product, nutrition information format and traffic light system significantly affected the time needed by consumers to find the nutrition information and to classify the labels according to their content of a given nutrient. Meanwhile, consumers' understanding of the labels was mostly affected by the content of the nutrient and the presence of the traffic light system.

Spatial facilitation is involved in flash-lag effect.

The flash-lag effect (FLE) is the perceptual phenomenon in which a flash adjacent to a continuously moving object is perceived behind it. Horizontal propagation of activity could explain a shorter latency for moving than for flashed objects but, to our knowledge, no psychophysical data supporting this has been given. We show that two concurrent moving stimuli increase the FLE, presumably due to a latency decrease in movement perception. Our results support the idea that spatial facilitation along the trajectory of a moving object reduces movement perception delay and, therefore, sustains an involvement of latency differences in FLE generation.

Percepción de la aceleración en el movimiento en profundidad con información monocular y con información monocular y binocular / Perception of acceleration in motion-in-depth with only monocular and both monocular and binocular information

En muchas ocasiones es necesario adecuar nuestras acciones a objetos que cambian su aceleración. Sin embargo, no se ha encontrado evidencia de una percepción directa de la aceleración. En su lugar, parece ser que somos capaces de detectar cambios de velocidad en el movimiento 2-D dentro de una ventana temporal. Además, resultados recientes sugieren que el movimiento en profundidad se detecta a través de cambios de posición. Por lo tanto, para detectar aceleración en profundidad sería necesario que el sistema visual lleve a cabo algun tipo de cómputo de segundo orden. En dos experimentos, mostramos que los observadores no perciben la aceleración en trayectorias de aproximación, al menos en los rangos que utilizados [600-800 ms] dando como resultado una sobreestimación del tiempo de llegada. Independientemente de la condición de visibilidad (sólo monocular o monocular más binocular), la respuesta se ajusta a una estrategia de velocidad constante. No obstante, la sobreestimación se reduce cuando la información binocular está disponible (AU)