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The phenomenological influence of inner speech on executive functions
Abstract and Figures
Inner speech is an internal verbalisation that can contribute to solving complex tasks. Variations of Inner speech and its influence on specific executive functions in typically developing adults is an area of research that is underdeveloped. This study used the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (VISQ) and split participants into high and low inner speech quality levels. Each participant completed three conditions; standard (no instruction to use or inhibit self-talk), articulatory suppression (which aims to block a person's inner and private speech by omitting its usage) and overtly verbalising (talking out loud), to investigate the qualitative influence of inner speech on two measures of executive function. Experiment 1 (The Tower of London) showed no effect of inner speech quality levels on any of the three conditions; findings suggest that planning is not dependent upon inner speech. Experiment 2 (Card Sorting Task) indicated that lower quality levels of inner speech significantly benefited task performance; findings suggest that higher quality levels of inner speech are significantly detrimental to cognitive flexibility. These results are essential for understanding the inter-individual role of inner speech quality in supporting complex executive functions. Additionally, the findings advocate that inner speech has separable trajectories for specific executive functions. Understanding the possible interactions between inner speech quality and specific executive functions could assist in maximising performance and interventions for typical and atypical populations.
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Eighty patients and thirty controls were interviewed using one interview that promoted personal disclosure and another about everyday topics. Speech was scored using the Thought, Language and Communication scale (TLC). All participants completed the Self-Concept Clarity Scale (SCCS) and the Varieties of Inner Speech Questionnaire (VISQ). Patients scored lower than comparisons on the SCCS. Low scores were associated the disorganized dimension of TD. Patients also scored significantly higher on condensed and other people in inner speech, but not on dialogical or evaluative inner speech. The poverty of speech dimension of TD was associated with less dialogical inner speech, other people in inner speech, and less evaluative inner speech. Hallucinations were significantly associated with more other people in inner speech and evaluative inner speech. Clarity of self-concept and qualities of inner speech are differentially associated with dimensions of TD. The findings also support inner speech models of hallucinations.
Objectives:
Euthymic patients with bipolar disorder (BD) show executive impairment. Assisting cognitive function with non-pharmacological strategies has not been widely explored in BD. In schizophrenia, concomitant verbalisation (self-monitoring) during executive tests improved performance. The present pilot study assesses the effects of self-monitoring whilst completing the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test (WCST) in BD patients.
Methods:
Thirty-six euthymic BD patients and 42 healthy controls participated. Twenty patients with BD and 20 controls received standard administration and 16 patients and 22 controls used self-monitoring during the test.
Results:
ANCOVA revealed a significant "group by administration" interaction. Patients who received the standard administration were significantly worse than healthy controls (trials administered: p = .012, XX = 0.17; trials to first category: p = .046, XX = 0.11; failure to maintain set: p = .003, XX = 0.23). BD patients who self-monitored performed significantly better than patients receiving the standard administration (trials to first category: p = .020, XX = 0.17) and showed no significant differences in performance compared to controls.
Conclusion:
Self-monitoring deserves further investigation as a tool that may be helpful for patients with BD. Further exploration of the utility, generalisability, and stability of the effects of self-monitoring is needed.
Cognitive models have suggested that auditory hallucinations occur when internal mental events, such as inner speech or auditory verbal imagery (AVI), are misattributed to an external source. This has been supported by numerous studies indicating that individuals who experience hallucinations tend to perform in a biased manner on tasks that require them to distinguish self-generated from non-self-generated perceptions. However, these tasks have typically been of limited relevance to inner speech models of hallucinations, because they have not manipulated the AVI that participants used during the task. Here, a new paradigm was employed to investigate the interaction between imagery and perception, in which a healthy, non-clinical sample of participants were instructed to use AVI whilst completing an auditory signal detection task. It was hypothesized that AVI-usage would cause participants to perform in a biased manner, therefore falsely detecting more voices in bursts of noise. In Experiment 1, when cued to generate AVI, highly hallucination-prone participants showed a lower response bias than when performing a standard signal detection task, being more willing to report the presence of a voice in the noise. Participants not prone to hallucinations performed no differently between the two conditions. In Experiment 2, participants were not specifically instructed to use AVI, but retrospectively reported how often they engaged in AVI during the task. Highly hallucination-prone participants who retrospectively reported using imagery showed a lower response bias than did participants with lower proneness who also reported using AVI. Results are discussed in relation to prominent inner speech models of hallucinations.
Planning on the 4-disk version of the Tower of London (TOL4) was examined in stroke patients and unimpaired controls. Overall TOL4 solution scores indicated impaired planning in the frontal stroke but not non-frontal stroke patients. Consistent with the claim that processing the relations between current states, intermediate states, and goal states is a key process in planning, the domain-general relational complexity metric was a good indicator of the experienced difficulty of TOL4 problems. The relational complexity metric shared variance with task-specific metrics of moves to solution and search depth. Frontal stroke patients showed impaired planning compared to controls on problems at all three complexity levels, but at only two of the three levels of moves to solution, search depth and goal ambiguity. Non-frontal stroke patients showed impaired planning only on the most difficult quaternary-relational and high search depth problems. An independent measure of relational processing (viz., Latin square task) predicted TOL4 solution scores after controlling for stroke status and location, and executive processing (Trail Making Test). The findings suggest that planning involves a domain-general capacity for relational processing that depends on the frontal brain regions.
Unstuck and On Target (UOT) is an executive function (EF) intervention for children with autism spectrum disorders (ASD) targeting insistence on sameness, flexibility, goal-setting, and planning through a cognitive-behavioral program of self-regulatory scripts, guided/faded practice, and visual/verbal cueing. UOT is contextually-based because it is implemented in school and at home, the contexts in which a child uses EF skills.
To evaluate the effectiveness of UOT compared with a social skills intervention (SS), 3rd-5th graders with ASD (mean IQ = 108; UOT n = 47; SS n = 20) received interventions delivered by school staff in small group sessions. Students were matched for gender, age, race, IQ, ASD symptomotolgy, medication status, and parents' education. Interventions were matched for 'dose' of intervention and training. Measures of pre-post change included classroom observations, parent/teacher report, and direct child measures of problem-solving, EF, and social skills. Schools were randomized and evaluators, but not parents or teachers, were blinded to intervention type.
Interventions were administered with high fidelity. Children in both groups improved with intervention, but mean change scores from pre- to postintervention indicated significantly greater improvements for UOT than SS groups in: problem-solving, flexibility, and planning/organizing. Also, classroom observations revealed that participants in UOT made greater improvements than SS participants in their ability to follow rules, make transitions, and be flexible. Children in both groups made equivalent improvements in social skills.
These data support the effectiveness of the first contextually-based EF intervention for children with ASD. UOT improved classroom behavior, flexibility, and problem-solving in children with ASD. Individuals with variable background/training in ASD successfully implemented UOT in mainstream educational settings.
This study investigated the involvement of inner speech limitations in the executive dysfunction associated with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs). Seventeen children with ASD and 18 controls, statistically-matched in age and IQ, performed a computer-based card sorting test (CST) to assess cognitive flexibility under four conditions: baseline, with articulatory suppression, with a concurrent mouthing task, and while verbalizing their strategies aloud. Articulatory suppression adversely affected CST performance for the control group but not the ASD group. The results additionally showed that overtly verbalizing strategies did not benefit the ASD children as it did the typically developing children. The findings thus provide further evidence that ASD children do not use inner speech to the same extent, or with the same effectiveness, as typically developing children when performing executive tasks.
Young children often talk to themselves out loud. Indeed, there is a substantial literature on children's private speech demonstrating that verbal mediation in the form of overt self-directed speech is an important feature of children's engagement with the world (e.g., see edited volumes by Díaz & Berk, 1992, and Zivin, 1979). Adults, too, talk to themselves out loud – this in spite of the stigma often associated with private speech. In this regard, the American sociologist Irving Goffman (1981) reminds us that “in our society a taboo is placed on self-talk” (p. 81), a taboo whose existence could quite reasonably be expected to inhibit private speech in those (mostly adults) for whom this taboo has some authoritative value. Goffman notes that due to the taboo nature of self-talk, “it is mainly through self-observation and hearsay that one can find out that a considerable amount goes on” (p. 81). A small but growing empirical literature on adolescents' and adults' use of private speech – on its “persistence,” as our title indicates – appears to confirm this suspicion. Our emphasis on the persistence of private speech already suggests a direction for our argument: namely, that of expanding the conventional Vygotskian view – perpetuated, implicitly if not explicitly, in almost all the contemporary literature on the subject – that private speech is limited to a particular developmental stage occurring during childhood.
The current state of A.D. Baddeley and G.J. Hitch's (1974) multicomponent working memory model is reviewed. The phonological and visuospatial subsystems have been extensively investigated, leading both to challenges over interpretation of individual phenomena and to more detailed attempts to model the processes underlying the subsystems. Analysis of the controlling central executive has proved more challenging, leading to a proposed clarification in which the executive is assumed to be a limited capacity attentional system, aided by a newly postulated fourth system, the episodic buffer. Current interest focuses most strongly on the link between working memory and long-term memory and on the processes allowing the integration of information from the component subsystems. The model has proved valuable in accounting for data from a wide range of participant groups under a rich array of task conditions. Working memory does still appear to be working.