Pedro Cardoso-Leite

University of Luxembourg · xcit.org

Traditionally, theory and practice of Cognitive Control are linked via literature reviews by human domain experts. This approach, however, is inadequate to track the ever-growing literature. It may also be biased, and yield redundancies and confusion. Here we present an alternative approach. We performed automated text analyses on a large body of s...

Understanding human cognition involves developing computational models that mimic and possibly explain behavior; these are models that “act” like humans and produce similar outputs when facing the same inputs. To facilitate the development of such models and ultimately further our understanding of the human mind we created CogEnv: a reinforcement l...

The rise in digital media consumption, especially among children, raises the societal question of its impact on cognition, mental health and academic achievement. Here, we investigate three different ways of measuring technology use-—total hours of media consumed, hours of video game play and number of media used concurrently—-in 118 eight-to-twelv...

Humans extract statistical regularities over time by forming internal representations of the transition probabilities between states. Studies on sequence prediction learning typically focus on how experiencing a particular sequence allows the underlying generative model to be learned. Here we ask what role generative models play when participants e...

This chapter reviews the behavioral and neuroimaging scientific literature on the cognitive consequences of playing various genres of video games. The available research highlights that not all video games have similar cognitive impact; action video games as de fined by first-and third-person shooter games have been associated with greater cognitiv...

For more than a century, scientists have been collecting behavioral data--an increasing fraction of which is now being publicly shared so other researchers can reuse them to replicate, integrate or extend past results. Although behavioral data is fundamental to many scientific fields, there is currently no widely adopted standard for formatting, na...

The rise in digital media consumption, especially among children, raises the societal question of its impact on cognition, mental health and academic achievement. Here, we review the impact of three different ways of measuring technology use-total hours of media consumed, hours of video game play and number of media used concurrently-in a study sur...

There is no consensus on which statistical model estimates school value-added (VA) most accurately. To date, the two most common statistical models used for the calculation of VA scores are two classical methods: linear regression and multilevel models. These models have the advantage of being relatively transparent and thus understandable for most...

Numerous cognitive tasks, like the n-back, employ sequences of stimuli to target particular cognitive functions. These sequences are generated to satisfy specific criteria but the generation process typically induces unintentional statistical structure in the sequences which may not only affect performance but also alter the strategies participants...

Cognitive scientists want to ensure that particular cognitive tasks target particular cognitive functions that can be mapped to stable neural markers. Numerous cognitive tasks, like the n-back, involve generating sequence of trials which satisfy certain statistical properties.The common approach to generate these sequences however lacks a theoretic...

Action video games have great potential as cognitive training instruments for their data collection efficiency over standard testing, their natural motive power, and as they have demonstrated benefits for broad aspects of cognition. However, commercial video games do not allow researchers full control over games' unique features and parameters whil...

Automated learning systems allow educators to scale up their efficacy, while personalized systems retain the ability to customize to the individual student. A core issue in developing such adaptive learning systems is to understand how different items (e.g., math exercises) relate to one another, and to exploit this understanding to predict perform...

Poster for Mathematical Cognition and Learning Society and Educational Data Mining conferences.

Efficient learning experiences require content to dynamically match a learner's skill; this assumes a fast and accurate assessment of the learner's skill and the ability to update content accordingly. Effective personalized learning therefore involves deriving a performance-predictive mapping between behavioral and environmental factors. Once learn...

Mathemarmite offers young children an opportunity to hone their counting abilities in a cosy, timeless and friendly environment where they can follow various recipes and mix specific ingredients in the right quantities in a cauldron to cast spells and discover a variety of monstrous transformations that they can immortalize in their Monster Photobo...

Playing action video games has previously been linked to improvements in attentional control, the ability to choose what to attend and what to ignore that relies on a frontoparietal network of the brain. Here we asked whether action video game training would impact a range of mathematical abilities that rely on similar brain regions. Twenty-four ad...

The ability to learn the structure of our surrounding world rely largely on the faculty to uncover statistical regularities and to create and update internal models based on past experience. This study presents a new, short (20min), and entirely computer-administered task that taps these two components, referred to as ‘structural learning’ and asks...

Technology has the potential to impact cognition in many ways. Here we contrast two forms of technology usage: (1) media multitasking (i.e., the simultaneous consumption of multiple streams of media, such a texting while watching TV) and (2) playing action video games (a particular subtype of video games). Previous work has outlined an association...

Online data collection methods have particular appeal to behavioral scientists because they offer the promise of much larger and much more representative data samples than can typically be collected on college campuses. However, before such methods can be widely adopted, a number of technological challenges must be overcome - in particular in exper...

The left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (ldlPFC) has been highlighted as a key actor in human perceptual decision-making (PDM): It is theorized to support decision-formation independently of stimulus type or motor response. PDM studies however generally confound stimulus onset and task onset: when the to-be-recognized stimulus is presented, subject...

A briefly flashed target stimulus can become "invisible" when immediately followed by a mask-a phenomenon known as backward masking, which constitutes a major tool in the cognitive sciences. One form of backward masking is termed metacontrast masking. It is generally assumed that in metacontrast masking, the mask suppresses activity on which the co...

The notion that play may facilitate learning has long been touted. Here, we review how video game play may be leveraged for enhancing attentional control, allowing greater cognitive flexibility and learning and in turn new routes to better address developmental disorders. Video games, initially developed for entertainment, appear to enhance the beh...

A thought-provoking new study has found that symptom-free carriers of the neurodegenerative Huntington's disease present a dramatic two-fold acceleration in perceptual learning.

Voluntary actions are thought to be selected with respect to their intended goal. Converging data suggests that medial frontal cortex plays a crucial role in linking actions to their predicted effects. Recent neuroimaging data also suggests that during action selection, the brain pre-activities the representation of the predicted action effect. We...

The systematic association of an action that a person performs with its sensory effects is thought to attenuate that person's perception of the effect of the action. However, whether learned sensorimotor contingencies truly affect perception, rather than just inducing a response bias, has yet to be determined. The experiment presented in this artic...

Providing evidence against a dissociation between conscious vision for perception and unconscious vision for action, recent studies have suggested that perceptual and motor decisions are based on a unique signal but distinct decisional thresholds. The aim of the present study was to provide a direct test of this assumption in a perceptual-motor dua...

The relationship between Temporal Order Judgment (TOJ) and Response Time (RT) has been an object of debate since Exner and even more so in the context of the ongoing dispute on the sensorimotor dissociation1,2. If anything, the most pervasive fact in the TOJ-RT literature is that the two sorts of behavior display a non-systematic relationship wheth...

With its roots in Ungerleider and Mishkin's (1982) uncovering of two distinct - ventral and dorsal - anatomical pathways for the processing of visual information, and boosted by Goodale and Milner's (1992; Milner and Goodale, 1995) behavioral study of patients with lesions of either of these pathways, the perception-action dissociation became a sta...

The metajudgment of motor responses refers to our ability to evaluate the accuracy of our own actions. Can humans metajudge the duration of their Reaction Times (RTs) to a light-flash and the accuracy of their reproduction of a reference time interval bounded by two light flashes (Anticipatory Response Time, ART)? A series of four distinct experime...

This study investigated the effects on perceptual and motor decisions of low-contrast distractors, presented 5 degrees on the left and/or the right of the fixation point. Perceptual decisions were assessed with a yes/no (distractor) detection task. Motor decisions were assessed via these distractors' effects on the trajectory of an impending saccad...

To compare the timing of perceptual and motor decisions, distinct tasks have been designed, all of which have yielded systematic differences between these two moments. These observations have been taken as evidence of a sensorimotor dissociation. Inasmuch as the distinction between perceptual and motor decision moments is conceptually warranted, th...

Although a large number of studies have demonstrated that a motor response to a visual stimulus is, at least to some extent, independent of the perceptual response, little effort has been spent on the investigation of the explicit characteristics of this independency. In the present experiment, observers were presented with an S1-S2 stimulus-pair,...

We present a simple reaction time (RT) versus temporal order judgment (TOJ) experiment as a test of the perception-action relationship. The experiment improves on previous ones in that it assesses for the first time RT and TOJ on a trial-by-trial basis, hence allowing the study of the two behaviors within the same task context and, most importantly...

Une stimulation physique peut donner lieu à une expérience visuelle et/ou à une action motrice. Cette relative indépendance sensorimotrice a donné lieu à l'hypothèse de deux sous-systèmes visuels distincts. La confrontation entre les jugements d'ordre temporel (JOT, tâche perceptive) et les temps de réaction simple (TR, tâche motrice) est une des n...