Corentin Gonthier

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Verified

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• Doctor of Psychology
• Professor (Full) at Nantes Université

Working memory tasks designed for children usually present trials in order of ascending difficulty, with testing discontinued when the child fails a particular level. Unfortunately, this procedure comes with a number of issues, such as limited psychometric qualities for working memory scores, decreased engagement from high-ability children, and lar...

Strategic behavior plays a key role in fluid intelligence tasks like Raven's matrices. Some participants solve items using the strategy of mentally constructing the answer (constructive matching), which is effective but costly for complex problems; other participants rely on the less accurate strategy of discarding potential answers (response elimi...

Despite the abundant literature on visuospatial short-term memory, researchers have devoted little attention to strategic processes: What procedures do subjects implement to memorize visuospatial material? Evidence for various strategies exists, but it is spread across a variety of fields. This integrative review of the literature brings together s...

In 2015, Dutton and Lynn published an account of a decrease of intelligence in France (negative Flynn effect) which had considerable societal impact. This decline was argued to be biological. However, there is good reason to be skeptical of these conclusions. The claim of intelligence decline was based on the finding of lower scores on the WAIS-III...

Visuo-spatial reasoning tests, such as Raven’s matrices, Cattell’s culture-fair test, or various subtests of the Wechsler scales, are frequently used to estimate intelligence scores in the context of inter-racial comparisons. This has led to several high-profile works claiming that certain ethnic groups have lower intelligence than others, presumab...

To manage unpleasant emotions, such as anxiety in a stressful situation, engaging in a distracting activity can be a valuable coping mechanism. The effectiveness of distraction is thought to be regulated by the level of flow generated by the distracting activity. However, there has been little research about the dynamics of the relationship between...

Retrieving personal memories is usually accompanied by eye movements. Although the functional significance of eye movements during retrieval is relatively well established in the case of episodic memory, their role in autobiographical memory is not clearly delineated in the literature. This systematic review critically examines existing studies in...

Background Fake psychological tests tend to be viewed as completely believable (Barnum effect), meaning psychometric properties cannot be judged subjectively. Experiencing this effect first-hand could help get students interested in the science of psychological assessment. Objective In a blended learning perspective, we created materials to elicit...

Performance in reasoning tasks such as Raven’s matrices experiences a dramatic increase over cognitive development, but the mechanisms responsible for this increase are unknown. Many cognitive processes are involved in a matrix task and could potentially change with age; strategy use appears to be a good candidate, as it typically improves over dev...

Many studies have highlighted short-term memory (STM) impairment in dyslexic individuals. Several studies showed deficits for both item and serial order aspects of verbal STM in dyslexic individuals. These group-based studies, however, do not inform us about the prevalence of these deficits and, importantly, their potential heterogeneity at the ind...

For several years, there was a growing interest in intellectual giftedness and in particular in the non-cognitive specificities of gifted individuals. This topic attracted much public attention and sometimes led to contradictions with the scientific literature. The current review synthesizes a broad set of results related to non-cognitive specifici...

L’idée que les écrans font diminuer l’intelligence s’appuie seulement sur une poignée d’études peu qualitatives, qui montrent des effets très faibles et très biaisés par les différences d’usage de la télévision en fonction du milieu socioculturel. On peut même trouver de très petits effets positifs du numérique, en particulier des jeux vidéo. Quant...

Intelligence tests are often performed under time constraints for practical reasons, but the effects of time pressure on reasoning performance are poorly understood. The first part of this work provides a brief review of major expected effects of time pressure, which includes forcing participants to skip items, convoking a mental speed factor, cons...

Background: Distraction is a classic anxiety management strategy in preoperative setting with children: distracting activities take children's attention away from threatening clues. What is less clear is the differential effectiveness of this technique depending on the task, and the degree of children engagement with the distracting task. The pres...

Working memory performance depends on reactivating memory traces, by rapidly switching between refreshing item representations and performing concurrent cognitive processing (time-based resource sharing (TBRS) account). Prior research has suggested that variation in the effectiveness of this process could be a plausible source of developmental chan...

The items of intelligence tests can demonstrate differential item functioning across different groups: cross-sample differences in item difficulty or discrimination, independently of any difference of ability. This is also true of comparisons over time: as the cultural context changes, items may increase or decrease in difficulty. This phenomenon i...

For researchers and psychologists interested in estimating a subject's memory capacity, the current standard for scoring memory span tasks is the partial-credit method: subjects are credited with the number of stimuli that they manage to recall correctly in the correct serial position. A critical issue with this method, however, is that intrusions...

Scholars are aware of the power of social media to capture the attention of students, notably during lectures. Far from banning them, some teachers have considered using them to improve the motivation of students. One of the most popular social media platforms for that purpose is Twitter. It has been widely used in educational settings as a tool fo...

Divergent thinking tasks, which require participants to generate as many creative ideas as possible, elicit a serial order effect: Ideas generated later tend to be more original. This suggests that generating more ideas is beneficial. However, past research regarding the serial order effect has largely overlooked the interplay between serial order...

Developmental improvement of cognitive control is partly grounded in a transition from reactive control (waiting for a critical stimulus to occur) to proactive control (preparing control in advance based on active maintenance of contextual information). Whereas older children and adults spontaneously use proactive control, children younger than 5–6...

Land use and land cover (LULC) scenarios are often co-produced by researchers and a reduced group of local actors. While most scenarios’ evaluations analyse feedback from actors involved in the scenarios making, restricting the diffusion of scientific results to the co-construction group can limit their potential to support land management. In this...

Working memory is thought to be strongly related to cognitive control. Recent studies have sought to understand this relationship under the prism of the dual mechanisms of control (DMC) framework, in which cognitive control is thought to operate in two distinct modes: proactive and reactive. Several authors have concluded that a high working memory...

Lexical ambiguity is ubiquitous in oral language and sometimes induces comprehension difficulties. Moreover, in ecological situations language is rarely processed without any surrounding noise and one of the more frequent situations of language comprehension is speech-in-speech situations. In the present study we evaluated the cognitive process at...

The flow experience is a state in which people are completely concentrated and immersed in an activity. This positive psychology concept is relevant to both performance and subjective well-being in a range of activities, but it is difficult to measure: the usual methods of questionnaires and physiological measurements are inappropriate for many app...

Whereas much of the developmental literature has focused on the difficulties of young children in regulating their behavior, an increasing base of evidence suggests that children may be capable of surprisingly flexible engagement of cognitive control when based on implicit experience with the situation. One of the most fine-grained examples of impl...

Purpose Multiple factors impact reading acquisition in individuals with reading disability, including genetic disorders such as Williams syndrome (WS). Despite a relative strength in oral language, individuals with WS usually have an intellectual disability and tend to display deficits in areas associated with reading. There is substantial variabil...

Intellectually gifted children tend to demonstrate especially high working memory capacity, an ability that holds a critical role in intellectual functioning. What could explain the differences in working memory performance between intellectually gifted and nongifted children? We investigated this issue by measuring working memory capacity with com...

Cognitive control can be triggered by explicit or implicit events; it has been proposed that these two possibilities tap into dissociable mechanisms. In this study, we investigate this idea by testing whether young children, who struggle with explicitly triggered control, can demonstrate proportion congruency effects-which are based on implicit lea...

Problem-solving strategies in visual reasoning tasks are often studied based on the analysis of eye movements, which yields high-quality data but is costly and difficult to implement on a large scale. We devised a new graphical user interface for matrix reasoning tasks where the analysis of computer mouse movements makes it possible to investigate...

University students often engage in multimedia (e.g., texting or social networks) and nonmultimedia (e.g., chatting with neighbors) off-task multitasking behaviors during courses. The aim of the present study was to describe these off-task multitasking behaviors and analyze their effects on learning performance in a real teaching session. More spec...

Current theories posit multiple levels of cognitive control for resolving conflict, including list-level control: the global or proactive biasing of attention across a list of trials. However, to date, evidence for pure list-level control has largely been confined to the Stroop task. Our goals were twofold: (a) test the generality of theoretical ac...

Introduction Currently, international recommendations for obese and overweight people that explicitly target weight loss and are based on qualitative and/or quantitative nutritional counseling and increased physical activity do not appear to be effective in the long term. In contrast, intuitive eating seems to be an interesting alternative to dieti...

As they age, children tend to get more effective at regulating their behavior in complex situations; this improvement in cognitive control is often interpreted as a shift from predominantly reactive control to proactive control. There are three issues with this interpretation. First, hard evidence is lacking that younger children actually rely on r...

Les objectifs de cet article sont d’apporter une réflexion sur la manière d’estimer la capacité de la mémoire de travail (MDT), et d’étudier son développement de 8 à 23 ans à partir d'une unique épreuve adaptative et multimodale. La MDT, définie comme le stockage et la manipulation simultanés de l'information, est essentielle pour les apprentissage...

Intellectually gifted children tend to demonstrate especially high working memory capacity, an ability that holds a critical role in intellectual functioning. What could explain the differences in working memory performance between intellectually gifted and non-gifted children? We investigated this issue by measuring working memory capacity with co...

The objective of this study was to confirm the existence of knowledge relating to the cursive writing movement for French pupils in 3rd year of kindergarten, 2nd grade and 5th grade of elementary school. 141 pupils were asked to watch a visual presentation of cursive handwriting to determine whether they were able to detect violations of two rules...

Aim: To evaluate the relationship between the movement abnormalities of the impaired upper limb in children with unilateral cerebral palsy (CP) and bimanual performance. Method: Twenty-three children with unilateral CP (mean age 11y 10mo [SD 2y 8mo]) underwent evaluation of bimanual performance (Assisting Hand Assessment [AHA]) and a three-dimen...

La mémoire de travail correspond à la capacité à manipuler et à mémoriser brièvement des informations au cours d’une activité cognitive (Just & Carpenter, 1992). La littérature montre le rôle crucial de la mémoire de travail dans le fonctionnement intellectuel (Kane et al., 2005) et la réussite scolaire (Gathercole et al., 2003). La capacité de la...

Background The well-known rubber hand paradigm induces an illusion by having participants feel the touch applied to a fake hand. In parallel, the kinesthetic mirror illusion elicits illusions of movement by moving the reflection of a participant's arm. Experimental manipulation of sensory inputs leads to emergence of these multisensory illusions. T...

Investigating individual differences in cognition requires addressing questions not often thought about in standard experimental designs, especially regarding the psychometric properties of the task. Using the AX-CPT cognitive control task as a case study example, we address four concerns that one may encounter when researching the topic of individ...

Raw data for both the kinesthetic mirror illusion and the rubber hand illusion.

The Dual Mechanisms of Control (DMC) account (Braver, 2012) proposes two distinct mechanisms of cognitive control, proactive and reactive. This account has been supported by a large number of studies using the AX-CPT paradigm that have demonstrated not only between-group differences, but also within-subjects variability in the use of the two contro...

Sensory processing abnormalities are relatively universal in individuals with autism spectrum disorder, and can be very disabling. Surprisingly, very few studies have investigated these abnormalities in low-functioning adults with autism. The goals of the present study were (a) to characterize distinct profiles of sensory dysfunction, and (b) to un...

Most studies in individual differences in the field of working memory research use complex span tasks to measure working memory capacity. Various complex span tasks based on different materials have been developed, and these tasks have proven both reliable and valid; several complex span tasks are often combined to provide a domain-general estimate...

The Dual Mechanisms of Control framework posits the existence of two distinct control mechanisms, proactive and reactive, which may operate independently. However, this independence has been difficult to study with most experimental paradigms. The Stroop task may provide a useful way of assessing the independence of control mechanisms because the t...

Working memory capacity consistently correlates with fluid intelligence. It has been suggested that this relationship is partly attributable to strategy use: participants with high working memory capacity would use more effective strategies, in turn leading to higher performance on fluid intelligence tasks. However, this idea has never been directl...

Background: Rational emotive behavior therapy originally considered the concept of frustration intolerance in relation to different beliefs or cognitive patterns. Psychological disorders or, to some extent, certain affects such as frustration could result from irrational beliefs. Initially regarded as a unidimensional construct, recent literature...

Le concept d’intolérance à la frustration est considéré comme un facteur important des troubles psycho-affectifs. L’échelle d'intolérance à la frustration et à l'inconfort (FDS) d’Harrington (2005) a été développée pour évaluer ce phénomène. Notre objectif consistait à évaluer les propriétés psychométriques de l’échelle d'intolérance à la frustrati...

The constructs of working memory and cognitive control are conceptually close; a high working memory capacity is hypothesized to be associated with an efficient cognitive control. This hypothetical association has large implications for human cognition and provides an elegant explanation for the frequently reported relationship between working memo...

Participants with a high working memory span tend to perform better than low spans in a variety of tasks. However, their performance is paradoxically more impaired when they have to perform two tasks at once, a phenomenon that could be labeled the “hard fall effect.” The present study tested whether this effect exists in a short-term memory task, a...

The Iowa Gambling Task (IGT) is a sequential learning task in which participants develop a tendency towards advantageous options arising from the outcomes associated with their previous decisions. The role of working memory in this complex task has been largely debated in the literature. On one hand, low working memory resources lead to a decrease...

L’électro-encéphalographie (EEG) consiste à enregistrer à la surface du scalp les variations de potentiels électriques engendrées par l’activité cérébrale associée à un traitement cognitif. En combinaison avec une tâche de mémoire, l’EEG offre donc une fenêtre originale sur les processus mnésiques. Les modifications de l’activité cérébrale peuvent...