Kim Uittenhove

• PhD
• Research collaborator at University of Geneva

In a previous study, we found strategy sequential difficulty effects during strategy execution: People were slower after having executed a difficult strategy than after having executed an easier strategy (Uittenhove & Lemaire, in press). The goal of the current study was to test whether such strategy sequential difficulty effects on execution would...

Adults do not retrieve the answer to 2 + 3 from memory : Evidence from solution times Kim Uittenhove, Catherine Thevenot, Pierre Barrouillet Université de Genève, Geneva, Switzerland It is widely assumed that adults solve very simple addition problems (e.g., 2 + 3) largely by retrieval of the answer from memory (e.g., Ashcraft, 1987; Campbell & G...

Uittenhove and Lemaire (Exp Psychol 59(5):295-301, 2012) found that we are slower when executing a strategy following a difficult strategy than when executing the same strategy following an easier strategy (i.e., strategy sequential difficulty effects). Uittenhove and Lemaire suggested that difficult strategies temporarily reduce available executiv...

Objective: Consistent with Uittenhove and Lemaire (2012 ), we expected that strategy execution would be slower following execution of a difficult strategy than after an easy strategy (strategy sequential difficulty, SSD, effects). Moreover, we expected larger SSD effects in older adults than in young adults, and especially in Alzheimer's disease (...

Background Confronted with stressful circumstances, individuals use coping strategies to adapt. During the COVID-19 pandemic, individuals were threatened by an unprecedented health crisis, which governments tried to navigate with various imposed measures. Social distancing had massive negative consequences for mental health; yet studies also docume...

The term Super-Recognizer (SR), which describes individuals with supposedly superior facial recognition abilities, may be something of a misnomer. In the same way that blind individuals would not be considered prosopagnosic, SR diagnoses should emphasise at least face identity processing (FIP) specificity, if not recognition in particular. However,...

Background: Given the increasing number of people achieving exceptionally long lifespans, there is an urgent need for a better understanding of mental health in centenarians. This study aimed to understand the prevalence of mental health conditions-depressive symptoms, anxiety, sleep disturbances, disinhibition, and aberrant motor behaviour-among...

Background Despite most centenarians facing age-related declines in functional and cognitive capacities, the severity of these declines varies among individuals, as does the maintenance of good mental health (e.g., depressive symptoms) despite these declines. This study aims to examine this heterogeneity in centenarians from the Second Heidelberg C...

Altfhough every second child born after the year 2000 is expected to become a centenarian, little is known about what characterizes life at age 100. This is also the case for Switzerland, one of the countries with the highest life expectancy world-wide. In this presentation, we will report findings from SWISS100, the first nation-wide centenarian s...

Depressive symptoms (DS) are prevalent among older adults (WHO, 2021). However, data on DS appear to be scarce in centenarians. In addition, DS may have been aggravated by the COVID-19 pandemic, especially in centenarians who may have been more susceptible to the negative consequences of pandemic restrictions. Thus, as part of the SWISS100 study (J...

Introduction: Research on coping in advanced old age is scarce. In the present study, we explored coping patterns in near-centenarians and centenarians, and characteristics associated to using a specific coping pattern. Methods: We analyzed the frequency with which participants (N=87, MAge = 99.05; SDage = 2.6; age range 95-107) reported using s...

The transition to web-testing, although promising, entails many new concerns. Web-testing is harder to monitor, so researchers need to ensure that the quality of the data collected is comparable to the quality of data typically achieved by lab-testing. Our study yields a novel contribution to this issue, by being the first to distinguish between th...

Increase in very old individuals is observed in all developed countries around the world. The number of centenarians has also been rising, requiring the investigation of the characteristics of these exceptionally long-lived individuals as well as their experience of life at age 100. In the present study, we present findings from the first nation-wi...

Coping strategies help individuals face stressful events and adapt to them. During the second wave of the COVID19 pandemic, individuals were confronted with increased governmental restrictions that aimed in impeding the propagation of the virus, but affected, at the same time, the life as we knew it, with negative consequences for mental health. Th...

Over the past decades, centenarians have increasingly attracted the attention of the research community. This development reflects the constant rise of the numbers of very old individuals, but also the need to better understand longevity mechanisms and what characterizes life at age 100. This scoping review provided an overview of trends in centena...

Introduction Depression is one of the most frequent mental health problems in older populations. ¹ To the best of our knowledge, the prevalence of depressive symptomatology (DS) among centenarians in Switzerland is unknown. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic may have had a negative impact. As part of the study SWISS100 ² , we intend to provide key...

A paradigm shift is taking place in our field, with psychology researchers increasingly conducting their studies on the world-wide web. The transition to online experimentation, although promising in myriad ways, entails many new concerns. Researchers want to ensure that the quality from online collected data is comparable to what they typically ac...

Working memory is a cognitive system responsible for maintaining information. It is often assumed to contain different states of accessibility of information, which is highest for an item held in the focus of attention. Evidence for this heightened accessibility usually comes from item-recognition tasks, in which a memory list is followed by a prob...

Coping strategies are a source of resilience, yet little is known about their use in centenarians. We examined patterns in coping strategy use and determined how these patterns were associated with characteristics such as personality, cognitive status, quality of life, and health. We analyzed data from the Fordham Centenarian Study (N = 119), where...

Being considered as individuals with elevated risk of severe health reactions to the COVID19 infections, governments around the world have put in place wide-ranging measures to protect very old individuals from the virus. In the present study, we investigated centenarians’ experience of the COVID19 pandemic, to reach a better understanding of their...

Clozapine is an effective antipsychotic for the treatment of resistant schizophrenia. However, clozapine can lead to serious side effects. One of the most common side effects is constipation and in rare cases ileus, which is associated with a considerable case fatality rate. Our patient exhibited repeated episodes of ileus while being treated with...

Association Between Cognitive Functioning, Everyday Functioning, and Depressive Symptoms in Centenarians

According to associationist models, initial sequential processing of algorithmic steps is replaced through learning by single-step access to a memory instance. In an alphabet-arithmetic task where equations such as C + 3 = F have to be verified, the shift from algorithmic procedures to retrieval would manifest in a transition from steep slopes rela...

Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov’s valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear w...

This study tests an important and appealing hypothesis that has been around in the fields of cognitive psycho logy and neuroscience for over 40 years, but that lacks a conclusive empirical test. According to this hypothesis, there is a direct relationship between speed and capacity in working memory. Working memory refers to the ability to retain a...

It has recently been claimed that working memory (WM) storage is intrinsically domain-specific because the concurrent maintenance of an auditory and a visuospatial memory set did not involve any dual-task cost (Fougnie, Zughni, Godwin, & Marois, 2015). Using the same paradigm, we asked participants to concurrently maintain verbal auditory memory se...

Different retrieval rates for item and order information

Whether forgetting from working memory (WM) is only due to interference or is also caused by temporal decay is still a matter of debate. In the present study, this question was examined using complex span tasks in which each memory item was followed by a series of processing episodes, the duration and number of which were varied. It is known that r...

Presentation of empirical data regarding interference patterns between the simultaneous maintenance of auditory and visuo-spatial information

Efficient execution of strategies is crucial to memory performance and to age-related differences in this performance. Relative strategy complexity influences memory performance and aging effects on memory. Here, we aimed to further our understanding of the effects of relative strategy complexity by looking at the role of cognitive control function...

One of the cornerstones of human cognition is our ability to actively maintain information over time (i.e. working memory). Severely limited, this capacity depends on the interplay between the degradation and maintenance of representations held in working memory over time. Formal models have been proposed that characterize this interplay (e.g., Tim...

Children with developmental dyscalculia suffer from various deficits in the numerical domain. Still, retrieval of arithmetic facts from long-term memory seems to be their main difficulty (e.g., 3 + 2 = 5). Nevertheless, we question this clinical description and we rather suggest that dyscalculic children present a deficit in the automatization of c...

What is the nature of the reconstructive processes responsable for active maintenance of information in WM ? How does it interact with the nature of the information to be maintained ? How does it affect the balance between loss and reconstruction ?

Dans cette présentation, nous discutons des conséquences d’une approche alternative de l’automatisation de la capacité d’arithmétique simple pour la dyscalculie .

In this presentation, we review data in the light of the traditional model that views the automatisation of single-digit addition solving as a shift from slow counting procedures to retrieval of the answers from long-term memory. An alternative model of skill automatisation is proposed.

When expert adults are asked how they solve 3 + 2, they say that they simply know the result and that they do not have to resort to counting procedures. Researchers conclude that individuals retrieve the result of such simple problems from long-term memory. This conclusion is corroborated by the fact that problems that are said to have been solved...

The pattern of training effects on nontie and tie problems and the persistent problem size effect highlight the implication of procedures in adults’ simple addition

This study aimed at uncovering factors influencing execution of memory strategies and at furthering our understanding of ageing effects on memory performance. To achieve this end, we investigated strategy sequential difficulty (SSD) effects recently demonstrated by Uittenhove and Lemaire in the domain of problem solving. We found that both young an...

Strategy sequential difficulty effects are the findings that when participants execute strategies, performance is worse after a difficult strategy than after an easy strategy (Uittenhove & Lemaire, 2012). Strategy sequential difficulty effects are hypothesized to result from decreased working-memory resources following difficult strategy execution....

This book provides a comprehensive overview of numerical cognition by bringing together writing by leading researchers in psychology, neuroscience, and education, covering work using different methodological approaches in humans and animals. During the last decade there had been an explosion of studies and new findings with theoretical and translat...

In this thesis, we defend the notion that cognitive resources available for strategy execution do not only depend on the participant and current task demands but also on prior task demands. Strategy performance should thus be less efficient when the previous strategy was difficult (i.e., sequential difficulty effects). The notion of sequential diff...

In two experiments, we tested the hypothesis that strategy performance on a given trial is influenced by the difficulty of the strategy executed on the immediately preceding trial, an effect that we call strategy sequential difficulty effect. Participants’ task was to provide approximate sums to two-digit addition problems by using cued rounding st...

Le vieillissement cognitif s’accompagne de modifications au niveau des stratégies utilisées pour accomplir une tâche, ainsi que d’une diminution de l’efficacité des mécanismes de contrôle exécutif. La question posée dans cet article était de savoir si le déclin des mécanismes de contrôle exécutif pourrait être responsable du déclin stratégique au c...