<p>Involuntary episodic memories are memories that come into consciousness without preceding retrieval effort. These memories are commonplace and are relevant to multiple mental disorders. However, they are vastly understudied. We use a novel paradigm to elicit involuntary memories in the laboratory so that we can study their neural basis. In session one, an encoding session, sounds are presented with picture pairs or alone. In session two, in the scanner, sounds-picture pairs and unpaired sounds are reencoded. Immediately following, participants are split into two groups: a voluntary and an involuntary group. Both groups perform a sound localization task in which they hear the sounds and indicate the side from which they are coming. The voluntary group additionally tries to remember the pictures that were paired with the sounds. Looking at neural activity, we find a main effect of condition (paired vs. unpaired sounds) showing similar activity in both groups for voluntary and involuntary memories in regions typically associated with retrieval. There is also a main effect of group (voluntary vs. involuntary) in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a region typically associated with cognitive control. Turning to connectivity similarities and differences between groups again, there is a main effect of condition showing paired > unpaired sounds are associated with a recollection network. In addition, three group differences were found: (1) increased connectivity between the pulvinar nucleus of the thalamus and the recollection network for the voluntary group, (2) a higher association between the voluntary group and a network that includes regions typically found in frontoparietal and cingulo-opercular networks, and (3) shorter path length for about half of the nodes in these networks for the voluntary group. Finally, we use the same paradigm to compare involuntary memories in people with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) to trauma-controls. This study also included the addition of emotional pictures. There were two main findings. (1) A similar pattern of activity was found for paired > unpaired sounds for both groups but this activity was delayed in the PTSD group. (2) A similar pattern of activity was found for high > low emotion stimuli but it occurred early in the PTSD group compared to the control group. Our results suggest that involuntary and voluntary memories share the same neural representation but that voluntary memories are associated with additional cognitive control processes. They also suggest that disorders associated with cognitive deficits, like PTSD, can affect the processing of involuntary memories.</p> / Dissertation

Recent evidence suggests that when performing reach-and-grasp actions on day-to-day objects, lift-actions are faster to execute relative to use-actions, and that a “use-on-lift” interference occurs and produces switch costs when changing actions from using to then lifting (Jax & Buxbaum, 2010; Osiurak & Badets, 2016). Such findings result from paradigms that include the sudden appearance of objects, requiring participants to react quickly to the features of the object, independent of the functionality of the objects. Because of the importance this topic has to day-to-day interactions with objects, the following four experiments were executed with objects continuously visible to participants. When imitating images of hand actions on objects, participants showed no differences in the initiation time of use- and lift-actions, suggesting that no systematic differences exist between these two actions. Using this as a baseline, we compared a more generative approach, as when actions are instructed by auditory sentences. In this case, we see that switching actions is difficult, switching objects is even more difficult, and that use-actions are modestly faster than lift-actions; the reverse of what previous research shows. In a third experiment modelled after the paradigm used in studies producing rapid lift- and slowed use-actions, we showed that use-actions are actually facilitating lift-actions. Further, we demonstrate that having a use-action goal in mind provides the knowledge required to perform a lift-action, and that use-actions are again faster than lift-actions. These results are a critical addition to the task-switching literature on the cognitive control of motor processes associated with hand actions as distinctions are made between non-naturalistic and realistic settings relevant to day-to-day interactions with objects. We show that use-actions facilitate lift-actions and that, in realistic settings, both use- and lift-actions require access to stored knowledge. / Graduate / 0633 / hvanmook@uvic.ca

Growing bodies of research suggests associations between regular physical activity (PA) and emotional health. One promising mechanism of this association is a cognitive process called cognitive control. Emerging evidence links regular PA to better cognitive control in young adult populations (e.g., Themanson, Pontifex & Hillman, 2008; Winneke et al., 2011). However, almost no research has examined associations between regular PA and cognitive control task performance with emotionally-charged stimuli. Such tasks have the potential to help detect cognitive benefits of regular PA and may more effectively elicit cognitive processes related to emotional functioning than do emotionally-neutral tasks. The current study investigated whether cognitive control is a mechanism that links regular PA and emotional functioning in young adults, particularly when emotional processing in incorporated. In other words, cognitive control, particularly in the face of emotional distractors, was expected to mediate the association between regular PA and emotional health. Participants in this study comprised 115 young adults from an undergraduate population who responded to self-report measures of PA level and emotional functioning, completed neutral and emotional cognitive control tasks, and participated in a fitness assessment. Bootstrapping to assess indirect effects revealed that contrary to hypotheses, performance on neutral and emotional cognitive control tasks did not mediate the association between PA level and emotional functioning. Regular PA was not associated with better neutral or emotional cognitive control, nor did it relate significantly to emotional functioning. Further, neither neutral nor emotional cognitive control showed a relationship with emotional functioning. Implications and future directions are discussed.

Executive function (EF) and theory of mind (ToM) skills develop rapidly during the preschool years and have been found to directly and indirectly contribute to school readiness. Evidence indicates that EF may influence ToM development, though this relation may not be consistent across children from different backgrounds. Additionally, socioeconomic status (SES) has been shown to affect preschoolers’ EF, while the literature is mixed regarding the effects – if any – that SES may have on ToM development. Though the relation between EF and ToM appears robust across the literature, the possible effects of SES on this relation have yet to be fully explored. As children from low-SES homes are more likely to fall behind at the start of school, and this achievement gap is likely to widen through the school years, it is important to understand how the cognitive components that contribute to school readiness develop and are affected by SES so that we may work toward improving preschool education for children across all socioeconomic backgrounds. The primary purpose of the current study was to determine whether SES affected the relation between EF and ToM among urban preschool children (ages 3-5 years) from various SES backgrounds. In addition to examining the EF-ToM relation, relations among SES, general cognitive skills, EF, and ToM, as well as relations among age, EF, and ToM, were examined. Results from correlational and regression analyses indicated that SES was related to EF but not ToM, and that EF was not related to ToM after controlling for age. Inconsistent with the majority of previous findings, the results did not support the hypothesized link between EF and ToM. However, the findings from this study do add support to the large body of literature pertaining to the positive relation between SES and EF, and provide evidence that ToM may be relatively protected from the negative effects of low-SES among preschoolers. Results also support previous reports of large age-related changes in EF and ToM that occur during the preschool years. The implications for preschool development and education are discussed.

Encore très peu de travaux de psychologie se sont penchés sur l’activité d’ordonnancement, par exemple dans la planification des tâches, de l’occupation des personnels et des machines dans des ateliers. Jusqu’alors, les travauxexistants dans la littérature ont cherché à décrire les procédures mises en oeuvre par les ordonnanceurs. En adoptantle point de vue complémentaire des représentations manipulées, cette thèse a examiné les processus psychologiquesimpliqués dans cette activité, en termes de gestion de contraintes. Deux situations d’ordonnancement ont été étudiées : la conception d’emploi du temps et l’ordonnancement manufacturier. En comparant l’activité de novices à celle d’experts,nous avons observé que la stratégie experte est de s’appuyer sur les contraintes visibles dans le Système de Représentation et de Traitement externe de la solution au problème d’ordonnancement (emploi du temps ou diagrammede Gantt). Ces études nous ont également permis de confirmer la capacité d’abstraction des ordonnanceurs experts. De plus, en choisissant deux cas particuliers d’ordonnancement, nous avons aussi pu comparer leurs similarités et leurs différences. Par ailleurs, à partir d’un travail mené antérieurement à l’IRCCyN dans le domaine de la recherche opérationnelle, nous avons évalué un outil d’assistance à l’ordonnancement. Ce travail pluridisciplinaire nous a permisd’examiner l’effet d’une des modalités de coopération homme-­‐machine (le contrôle mutuel de la machine) sur l’activitéde l’ordonnanceur, mais aussi la question de la gestion des risques de panne par les ordonnanceurs / Only a few research works in psychology are devoted to scheduling, for example about planning tasks, workers and machines occupation in the shop. In the literature, schedulers are mainly described from the procedural viewpoint. For describing scheduling activity, we adopted the complementary representational viewpoints in terms of constraints management. Two scheduling situations have been studied: timetabling and industrial scheduling. By comparing novices and experts, we observed that the latter used constraints visible on the timetable or on the Gantt chart, to solve the scheduling problem. Moreover, experts used a higher level of abstraction than novices in the control of processing. Finally, we highlighted the similarities and differences between industrial scheduling and timetabling. In addition, we conducted a multidisciplinary study from a previous work in the field of operational research by evaluating a scheduling tool. We investigated the effect of the mutual control modality on human scheduling decisions, and the management of breakdowns risks in a shop by schedulers

The symptomatology of depression includes affective and cognitive features. As such, depression has been associated both with maladaptive concern over emotional material, and also with general impairments in attentional control. In the current thesis, I investigated the potential influence of such depression-related dysfunctional emotional processing on a range of cognitive control abilities, using experimental paradigms containing either neutral or affective stimuli. In contrast to the hypothesis that depressive symptoms are associated with generally compromised cognitive control, depression-related impairments were not found on a range of ‘classic' measures of cognitive control, including error-processing (pre-error speeding, posterror slowing and error-related ERPs), overriding response conflict (colour-word Stroop interference, conflict adaptation) or more sustained control processes (cued-RT performance, preparatory ERPs, and maintaining long-term speed-accuracy tradeoffs). Interestingly, however, differences between groups with low and elevated levels of depressive symptoms emerged during the performance of emotionally valenced tasks. First, an elevated depressive symptom group showed a reduced ability to resolve emotional conflict arising between competing affective representations. When compared with spared performance on the classic Stroop task, this result suggests that depressive symptoms are associated with a specific impairment in the ability to regulate emotional distraction. Secondly, an ERP related to advanced preparation in cued-RT tasks (the CNV), but not those associated with early perceptual processing (P1, N170), was selectively modulated by negative, but not positive, task-irrelevant emotional distractors presented during the cue-target interval. This pattern of ERP results supports a late processing locus of affective attentional bias in depression. Together, the current results propose that control processes which facilitate the regulation of emotional material (i.e. over emotional sources of distraction) might be selectively affected by increased depressive symptoms, suggesting that future work should consider affective variables when investigating executive control processes in depression.

Agir de façon optimale dans un environnement incertain nécessite d'évaluer et de comparer les coûts et bénéfices des différentes alternatives. Cela implique aussi de réguler et de contrôler le comportement de façon flexible pour optimiser les périodes de recherche de gains ou de ressources et les périodes d'exploitation des acquis. Une des hypothèses actuelles sur les mécanismes neurobiologiques impliqués, propose que cortex cingulaire antérieur (CCA), associé à l’évaluation de l’action, et cortex préfrontal dorsolatéral (CPFdl), associé au contrôle cognitif, interagiraient pour réguler le comportement. Les travaux réalisés au cours de cette thèse ont permis de préciser le rôle joué par le CCA dans la détection et l’évaluation des performances ainsi que ses interactions avec le CPFdl au sein d'une boucle du contrôle cognitif. Menés grâce à des enregistrements électrophysiologiques chez le singe en comportement, ils apportent des précisions sur la séquence d’activation du CCA et du CPFdl dans la bande de fréquences gamma lors de l'adaptation du comportement. L’étude des potentiels de champs locaux de ces deux régions amènent à poser des hypothèses sur les mécanismes oscillatoires sous-jacents et notamment sur le rôle des communications basses fréquences entre le CCA et le CPFdl et leur implication différentielle entre recherche et exploitation. / Acting optimally in uncertain environments requires evaluating costs and benefits of choosing each alternative. It also requires to flexibly regulate between exploration for and exploitation of resources. One current hypothesis is that the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), involved in action valuation, and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC), involved in cognitive control, interact to elaborate an optimal regulation of behaviour. Studies achieved during this thesis allowed to precise the role of ACC in the detection and valuation of action outcomes as well as to describe the interactions with dlPFC in a cognitive control loop. Thanks to neurophysiological recordings in behaving monkey our work give new clues on the sequential activation of ACC and dlPFC during adaptation. The analyses of local field potentials allowed us to suggest hypotheses on the underlying oscillatory mechanisms, in particular on low frequency communications between ACC and dlPFC, and their modulation during exploration and exploitation.

Real-world human visual perception is superb, despite pervasive attentional capacity limitations that can severely impact behavioral performance. Long-term memory (LTM) is suggested to play a key role in efficiently deploying attentional resources; however, the nature of LTM-attention interactions remains poorly understood. Here, I present a series of behavioral and functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) investigations of the mechanisms of LTM-guided visual attention in 139 healthy participants (18-34 years). In Experiment 1, I hypothesized that humans can use memory to guide spatial attention to multiple discrete locations that have been previously studied. Participants were able to simultaneously attend to more than one spatial location using an LTM cue in a novel change-detection behavioral paradigm also used in fMRI Experiments 2 and 4. Cortical networks associated with LTM and attention often interact competitively. In Experiment 2, I hypothesized that the cognitive control network supports cooperation between LTM and attention. Three posterior regions involved with cognitive control were more strongly recruited for LTM-guided attention than stimulus-guided attention: the posterior precuneus, posterior callosal sulcus, and lateral intraparietal sulcus. In Experiment 3, I hypothesized that regions identified in Experiment 2 are specifically activated for LTM-guided attention, not for LTM retrieval or stimulus-guided attention alone. This hypothesis was supported. Taken together, the results of Experiments 2 and 3 identify a cognitive control subnetwork specifically recruited for LTM-guided attention. Experiment 4 tested how LTM-guided attention affected spatial responsivity of maps within intraparietal sulcus. I hypothesized that left parietal maps would change their spatial responsivity due to the left lateralized effects of memory retrieval. During stimulus-guided attention, contralateral visuotopic maps in the right but not left intraparietal sulcus responded to the full visual field. In contrast, during LTM-guided attention, maps in both the left and right intraparietal sulcus responded to the full visual field, providing evidence for complementary forms of dynamic recruitment under different attentional conditions. Together, these results demonstrate that LTM-guided attention is supported by a parietal subnetwork within the cognitive control network and that internal attentional states influence the spatial specificity of visuotopically mapped regions in parietal cortex.

Ce travail de thèse vise à étudier les mécanismes de contrôle cognitif mobilisés durant les modulations séquentielles de l’exécution stratégique. Nous avons également étudié l’évolution au cours du vieillissement de ces mécanismes. Les données recueillies montrent que, contrairement aux postulats des modèles des stratégies, l’exécution stratégique sur un problème est modulée par la stratégie utilisée sur le problème précédent. De plus, les données de la neuro-imagerie (i.e., électroencéphalographie et magnétoencéphalographie) ont montré l’activation des régions cingulaires antérieures et frontales inférieures, précédemment observées dans les tâches de conflit. Chez les participants âgés, on observe globalement un déclin de la capacité à moduler d’un essai à l’autre l’exécution stratégique. Toutefois, nous avons étudié un sous-groupe d’adultes âgés présentant un maintien des modulations séquentielles. Au niveau neurophysiologique, ces participants présentaient un décours temporel plus précoce et l’activation d’un réseau neuronal plus étendu. Ces modifications ont été interprétées comme reflétant l’activation de processus compensatoires afin de maintenir des performances similaires à celles des adultes jeunes. Les résultats nous permettent de préciser l’implication des mécanismes de contrôle cognitif dans les performances stratégiques, et de comprendre la contribution de ces mécanismes dans les variations stratégiques observées avec l’âge. / Recent studies suggest that cognitive control mechanisms, allowing regulations of behavior to support goal-directed behaviors, are involved during strategy execution, together with aging effects therein. However, the processes involved and how they change with age need further investigations. The present work aims to study cognitive control processes involved in sequential modulations of strategy execution. It also examines how these mechanisms evolve during aging. Altogether, these findings reveal that, in contrast with theoretical models of strategies that assume strategy independence, strategy execution on a given trial is modulated as a function of strategy execution on previous trial. Moreover, neuroimaging data (i.e., electroencephalography and magnetoencephalography) showed a specific neural network activated during such sequential modulations, involving anterior cingulate and inferior frontal regions. These regions are known to be activated in conflict tasks. In older adults, a decline in sequential modulations of strategy execution was observed. However, some older adults showed preserved behavioral performance, associated with changes in time course and brain regions engaged. Such changes were interpreted as reflecting compensatory mechanisms involved to maintain behavioral performance similar to young adults. All in all, results specify the implication of cognitive control mechanisms in strategic processing, and in strategic variations during aging.

Background: Approximately 7% of clinically referred youth exhibit profound impairment in the ability to regulate their affect, behavior, and cognition. This phenotype – often referred to as dysregulation – has been associated with a multitude of negative outcomes. Symptom overlap between dysregulation and other psychological disorders has generated debate regarding whether DP constitutes a distinct syndrome characterized by intense, persistent irritability or is merely the combination of symptoms from disruptive or mood disorders. In order to elucidate this question, the current study examined the transdiagnostic continuities and discontinuities in three RDoC constructs (frustrative non-reward, acute threat, and cognitive control) proposed to be mechanisms of irritability Method: Participants were 294 children ages 7-17 (M=10.94; 67% male). Emotional and behavioral symptoms were measured using the Child Behavior Checklist and the Kiddie Schedule for Affective Disorders and Schizophrenia. Frustrative non-reward was measured using a frustration-induction Go/No-Go paradigm during which heart rate variability was indexed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA) and pre-ejection period (PEP). Acute threat was measured using an Emotional Faces computer paradigm in conjunction with an eyetracker/pupilometer. Cognitive control was assessed with the Behavioral Rating Inventory of Executive Function (BRIEF), Delis-Kaplan Executive Function System (D-KEFS) and Stop Signal Task (SST). Results: Symptoms of dysregulation and non-episodic irritability were strongly, positively related. Due to a lack of demonstrated construct validity for the hypothesized RDoC constructs of frustrative non-reward, acute threat, and cognitive control, two alternative mechanisms—SNS response and cognitive dyscontrol of emotion—were derived from the data. Results showed that blunted sympathetic responsivity and poor executive control in response to emotion were predictive of more severe irritability symptoms. Finally, moderation analyses showed that among highly dysregulated children, low levels of sympathetic responsiveness were associated with more severe irritability symptoms. Conclusions: Despite phenotypic overlap with other forms of developmental psychopathology, dysregulated children can be distinguished based on the severity of their irritability symptoms. This supports the conceptualization of dysregulation as a unique syndrome characterized by intense and persistent irritability and lends credence to the novel diagnosis of DMDD. Furthermore, cognitive, behavioral and physiological patterns identified in this study suggest that difficulties with processing negative emotion—as opposed to frustration or threat specifically—may constitute a vulnerability for irritability.