A memória para a ordem dos eventos em uma sequência está relacionada com muitos domínios cognitivos, como direcionar o comportamento a um objetivo, reconhecer uma ação e prever eventos do ambiente. A codificação da ordem serial tem sido, portanto, um tema polêmico a ser explicado pelos modelos de memória de trabalho visuoespacial. Neste estudo investigamos a codificação incidental da ordem serial de eventos em tarefas de reconhecimento de sequências, nas quais a dimensão relevante para a resposta poderia ser a aparência visual, a localização espacial ou a conjunção visuoespacial dos eventos. A tarefa exigia que os participantes (n=60) detectassem uma mudança em um dos estímulos da sequência e ignorassem mudanças na dimensão irrelevante: a ordem na qual os eventos eram apresentados. De maneira geral, o desempenho foi mais prejudicado nas sequências em que a ordem dos itens mudava. A comparação das três condições de memória (aparência visual, localização espacial e conjunção visuoespacial) revelou que houve melhor desempenho na tarefa espacial. Nesta condição, ocorreu uma interação entre os fatores mudança na dimensão relevante (localização espacial) e mudança na dimensão irrelevante (ordem serial). Estes resultados revelam que a ordem foi codificada de forma incidental com as informações relevantes para a tarefa. A diferença do efeito da mudança da dimensão irrelevante para os três tipos de sequências sugere que a ordem foi codificada em um estágio inicial do processamento de informações e, por isto, incluída na comparação de características, gerando diferentes padrões de respostas conforme a modalidade do estímulo. A interação entre localização e ordem serial indica que a informação espacial foi registrada de maneira integrada à ordem dos eventos na sequência, em uma representação espaço-temporal unitária. Supõe-se que um mecanismo de manutenção da informação espacial tenha operado recitando os eventos na ordem em que foram apresentados na sequência. Considera-se, também, a possibilidade de a apresentação sequencial dos estímulos ter gerado uma representação visuoespacial baseada em uma organização temporal das informações. Neste caso, é provável que um mecanismo de integração de informações tenha operado para realizar a interface entre uma estrutura temporal previamente armazenada na memória de longo prazo e o conteúdo da memória de trabalho. Estes achados sugerem a existência de um sistema responsável pela conjunção de informações de diferentes dimensões e integração de conteúdos da memória de trabalho e memória de longo prazo. As evidências obtidas neste estudo têm implicações em diferentes áreas do conhecimento. Na perspectiva da psicologia cognitiva experimental são discutidos os modelos atuais de memória de trabalho. No âmbito da psicologia cognitiva aplicada são fornecidos subsídios teóricos para o desenvolvimento de ferramentas diagnósticas para caracterização de déficits de aprendizagem e lesões neurológicas relacionados com o processamento de sequências de informações visuoespaciais. Além disso, é possível estabelecer uma relação entre os processos de memória e os mecanismos de organização do comportamento em contextos clínicos. / The memory for the events order in a sequence is related to many cognitive domains, such as managing behavior to a goal, to recognize an action and anticipate events in the real world. The encoding of serial order has been a controversial topic to be explained by the models of visuospatial working memory. We investigated the incidental encoding of events serial order in recognition tasks sequences, in which a relevant dimension to the response could be the visual appearance, the spatial location or visuospatial conjunction of events. The task required that participants (n = 60) to detect a change in a sequence of stimuli and ignore changes in irrelevant dimension: the order in which events were presented. In general, performance was more impaired in the sequences where the order of items changed. The comparison of the three memory conditions (visual appearance, spatial location and visuospatial conjunction) revealed that there was better performance in spatial task. In this condition, there was an interaction between change in the relevant dimension (spatial location) and change in the irrelevant dimension (serial order). These results show that the order was codified indirectly with relevant information to the task. The difference in the effect of changing the dimension irrelevant to the three types of sequences suggests that the order was codified in an early stage of information processing and, therefore, included in feature comparison, generating different patterns of responses depending on the modality of the stimulus. The interaction between location and serial order indicates that the spatial information was registered in an integrated manner to the order of events following in a unitary space-time representation. It is assumed that a mechanism for maintenance of spatial information has operated reciting the events in the order they were presented in sequence. It is considered also the possibility that the sequential presentation of stimuli have generated a visuospatial representation based on information temporal organization. In this case, it is likely that a mechanism of information integration has operated to achieve the interface between a temporal structure previously stored in long-term memory and the contents of working memory. These findings suggest the existence of a system responsible for the combination of information from different dimensions and integration of working memory contents and long-term memory. Data obtained in this study have implications in different areas of knowledge. In view of experimental cognitive psychology current models of working memory are discussed. Within the cognitive psychology applied theoretical support are provided for the development of diagnostic tools for characterizing learning deficits and neurological injuries related to the processing of visuospatial information sequences. Furthermore, it is possible to establish a relationship between memory processes and the mechanisms of organization of behavior in clinical settings.

Episodic memory is a key feature in learning. One must remember past events to act upon a present situation. Episodic memory has been reported to be impaired in individuals with schizophrenia. In order to have an intact episodic memory the contextual features (context) must be bound to the content of the event; this mechanism is referred to as contextual binding. It is proposed that binding errors during the encoding process are responsible for episodic memory impairments in schizophrenia. Since the hippocampal formation is considered to be the central element for contextual binding, it is hypothesized that the synaptic disorganization described in this condition results in such a deficit. Moreover, the hippocampus mediates and influences other cognitive processes such as learning and executive functioning. Hence, a contextual binding deficit can have important consequences on cognition, behaviour and emotions. The object of this dissertation was to investigate the neurofunctioning, neuroanatomy and neurofunctional connectivity of the hippocampus while performing a task that utilized contextual binding mechanisms. Since spatial relational processing is part of contextual binding and is rooted in the hippocampal regions, visuospatial navigation, more precisely a wayfinding task, was used as a probe to activate the hippocampus and its associated regions in a group of patients with schizophrenia and matched healthy controls. The following dissertation presents three original research papers contributing to our understanding of the contextual binding and hippocampal deficits in schizophrenia. The first paper investigates the neurofunctioning of the hippocampus with a wayfinding task. The second paper investigates the hippocampal structural abnormality in schizophrenia and how it relates to performance during the wayfinding task. The third paper explores effective connectivity of the hippocampus with other brain regions involved in navigation in schizophrenia with a particular interest in the prefrontal cortex. These three studies demonstrate significant neurofunctional, neuroanatomical, and neurofunctional connectivity deficits in the hippocampus of the patients with schizophrenia compared to a healthy control population. Results of all three papers are further discussed in terms of research and clinical implications.

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The thesis performs an analysis on visuospatial complexity of dynamic scenes, and morespecifically driving scenes in the propose of gaining a knowledge on human visual perception of the visual information present in a typical driving scene. The analysis and measurement of visual complexity is performed by utilizing two different measure modelsfor measuring visual clutter, Feature congestion clutter measure [1] and Subband entropyclutter measure[1] introduced by Rosenholtz, a cognitive science and research. The thesisrepresent the performance of the computational models on a data set consisting of sixepisodes that simulate driving scenes with different settings and combination of visualfeatures. The results of evaluating the measure models are used to introduce a formulafor measuring visual complexity of annotated images by extracting valuable informationfrom the annotated data set using Scalabel[2], an annotation web- based open source tool.

Visuospatial complexity refers to the level of detail or intricacy present within a scene, takinginto account both spatial and visual properties of the dynamic scene or the place (e.g.moving images, everyday driving, video games and other immersive media). There havebeen several studies on measuring visual complexity from various viewpoints, e.g. marketing,psychology, computer vision and cognitive science. This research project aims atanalysing and evaluating different models and tools that have been developed to measurelow-level features of visuospatial complexity such as Structural Similarity Index measurement,Feature Congestion measurement of clutter and Subband Entropy measurement ofclutter. We use two datasets, one focusing on (reflectional) symmetry in static images,and another that consists of real-world driving videos. The results of the evaluation showdifferent correlations between the implemented models such that the nature of the sceneplays a significant role.

According to cognitive psychologists, consistent practice (i.e., tasks with a high degree of similarity) of a skill leads to the development of automaticity, with the degree of automatization being increased if the practice also involves exact repetition. Practice is skill specific, meaning that practicing one skill does not automatize related skills. Once achieved, automaticity has been characterized as the ability to perform a primary task with little interference from performing a concurrent secondary task. A second key characteristic of skill automatization is that it involves a gradual decrease in executive working memory (EWM) demands. The primary purpose of this study is to examine whether such claims put forth by cognitive psychologists are transferable to the automatization of second language (L2) bottom-up listening skills. The secondary purpose of this study is to explore whether reading while listening promotes listening automaticity to a greater extent than listening only, as has been argued in the L2 literature (Chang, 2011; Chang & Millett, 2014; Chang and Millett, 2016; Chang et al., 2018). The third purpose of this study is to examine whether visuospatial working memory (VWM) is a predictor of listening automaticity growth and to what degree it is related to EWM.Although L2 listening is regarded as a cognitive skill, the automatization of L2 listening has not been researched as described by cognitive psychologists. That is, using dual tasks and a reduction in EWM involvement as indices of automaticity, and providing consistent practice with an exact repetition component. In addition, the existing research into the question surrounding what kind of practice is more effective in bringing about L2 listening automaticity –listening while reading or listening only¬– has methodological flaws that have led to an inconclusive answer. To fill these gaps in the literature, I designed a listening-while-reading and a listening-only intervention that blended elements claimed to be conducive to automaticity development in cognitive psychology and L2 research, namely consistent training and exact repetition of stimuli and time pressure, while taking into account the methodological issues of previous L2 research. Data were collected from 290 Japanese high school students, who were assigned to the listening-while-reading, the listening-only, or a control group. Participants in the listening-only intervention listened to texts composed of a narrow range of vocabulary and grammar structures, which warranted consistency, whose speech rates increased by 10 words per minute (wpm) over the sessions from 100 wpm to 180 wpm. The listening-while-reading intervention involved listening to the same texts while reading the transcripts. Exact repetition of the stimuli was provided in both interventions by playing the texts two consecutive times in each intervention session. After the second listening, comprehension was assessed using a Japanese summary of the texts and a set of five multiple-choice questions. Degree of automatization was measured at three time points (i.e., Pretest, Posttest 1, and Posttest 2) separated by two cycles of training, through two dual tasks at each time point. The dual tasks, which consisted of listening to a text delivered at 160 wpm while drawing a series of vertical lines on blank paper and were followed by the abovementioned comprehension measures, were used to construct measures of automaticity. Dual-task data were linked through a Rasch longitudinal design, keeping text difficulty invariant across the dual tasks, with Rasch person measures for comprehension for subsequent analyses computed by combining scores on summaries and multiple-choice questions, while giving double weight to the summaries. Regarding the memory constructs, EWM was assessed through a speaking and a listening span task, whose scores were combined into a global EWM Rasch measure that was used in the analyses to test if the participants’ EWM costs diminished over time. Similarly, a single VWM Rasch measure was calculated by combining the participants’ scores on the Mr. Peanut task (DeAvila, 1974), which assesses visual memory, and the Corsi block span task (Corsi, 1972), which assesses spatial memory, as additional predictors of L2 listening automaticity. To my knowledge, measures of VWM have not previously been employed as predictors of listening ability. Results from a repeated-measures ANOVA and a multi-group latent growth model indicated that both intervention groups automatized their listening skills to a greater extent than the control group with the listening-only group developing automaticity to the largest extent. Although a reduction of EWM demands was not observed, possibly because the participants were not complete beginners and might have started the study with some degree of automaticity, the fact that they could perform the dual tasks less effortfully over time evidenced automatization. Interestingly, VWM significantly predicted growth in listening automaticity, which was interpreted to mean that as listeners automatize their listening skills, they become able to see what they hear. This result was explained in terms of attentional capacity limits, where higher-level processes, such as visualizing input, cannot be achieved until the lower-level processes such as word recognition or grammatical parsing have been automatized. Follow-up qualitative interviews corroborated the quantitative findings and extended them by suggesting that a small number of training sessions might be sufficient to develop listening automaticity. Results of an additional correlation analysis further showed that VWM and EWM are not highly related as has been shown by some experimental evidence in the working memory literature. The finding that listening only was superior to listening while reading is important because it contradicts previous research and suggests that to automatize listening, one needs to practice in real-operating conditions. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed. First, listening to texts whose speech rates increase over the practice sessions promotes listening automaticity. Next, claims by cognitive psychologists regarding the development of skill automaticity are largely generalizable to the natural conditions of classroom-based research focusing on the acquisition of real-world skills such as L2 listening. Last, the multi-component versus the unitary view of working memory. / Applied Linguistics

Although many researchers investigate the senses separately, most people have a coherent conscious experience of the world that is not divided into separate perceptions of vision, hearing, or other senses. The brain integrates the information received from our senses into a unified representation of the world around us. Previous research has demonstrated that what people perceive with one sense can influence their perception of stimuli with the other senses (Roffler & Butler, 1968; Marks, 2000). The current set of studies was designed to illuminate the associations between musical pitch and visuospatial motion. The first two experiments with infants revealed that 11-month-old infants are sensitive to associations between ascending and descending musical pitch and the direction of an object’s motion. Additionally, two more experiments with infants revealed that infants of the same age do not show the associations of rightward motion with ascending pitch and leftward motion with descending pitch that adults have demonstrated in some experiments (Eitan & Granot, 2006). The fifth experiment tested the influence of ascending and descending musical stimuli on making a visuospatial motion to a target location. Adult subjects demonstrated faster reaction times when using a trackball to move a cursor to a target location on a computer screen when the direction of the target was congruent with the musical stimulus to which they were listening. The effect was stronger for vertical target locations than for horizontal target locations. The results of these studies indicate that both infants and adults are sensitive to associations between musical pitch and visuospatial motion in the vertical plane, and adults may also make associations between musical pitch and visuospatial motion in the horizontal plane. / text

L'attention visuospatiale est un mécanisme de sélection et de traitement d'information qui se manifeste explicitement par l'orientation de la tête ou du regard. En anticipation d'une nouvelle information, le foyer de l'attention s'oriente implicitement en vision périphérique pour dissocier l'orientation du regard et du foyer implicite vers deux emplacements distincts. Dans cette situation, la réaction à une cible qui apparaît à l'emplacement du foyer implicite s'améliore par rapport aux autres cibles qui pourraient s'afficher dans un emplacement non-attendu. La problématique de la thèse est d'étudier comment détecter l'emplacement du foyer de l'attention implicite par décodage de l'activité cérébrale mesurée en électro-encéphalographie (EEG) avant l'affichage d'une cible visuelle dans 3 expériences réalisées chez des sujets sains. La première expérience aborde la problématique dans une condition où l'indication sur l'emplacement de la cible est globalement non-informative pour les sujets. Cependant, leur activité cérébrale suggère que ce type d'indication a tendance à induire un état d'alerte, de préparation ou d'orientation de l'attention dans le temps plutôt que dans l'espace. En lien avec ce résultat, la deuxième expérience aborde la problématique dans une condition ambiguë où l'attention du sujet s'oriente vers un emplacement sans lien systématique avec le contenu des indications. / Visuospatial attention is an information selection and processing mechanism whose overt manifestations consist of head or gaze shifts. In anticipation to new information, the focus of attention can also covertly shift to peripheral vision to share attention between two distinct locations: the overt one (center of gaze) and the covert one in periphery. In such a situation, the reaction to a target appearing at the focus of attention is enhanced with respect to targets appearing at unattended locations. This thesis addresses the problem of detecting the location of covert attention by decoding neural activity measured by electroencephalography (EEG) before target onset in 3 experiments on healthy subjects. The first experiment uses visuospatial cues that are non-informative about the target location. However, the neural activity reflects that non-informative cues tend to bring the subjects into a state related to alertness, motor preparation or temporal expectation rather than a spatial shift of attention. According to this result, the second experiment uses an ambiguous precueing condition in which the sujet's attention is shifted to spatial locations which bear a non-systematic relation to the information contained in the cues. With these ambiguous cues, we find that the proportion of targets displayed at unattended locations is equivalent to a non-informative condition, and that reaction speed and accuracy are dramatically impacted.

Using Hebb’s (1961) paradigm, it has been shown that older adults (OAs) fail to learn recurrent visuospatial supra-span sequence information (Turcotte, Gagnon, & Poirier, 2005); a deficit which has not been demonstrated on verbal versions of the same task or in younger adults (YAs). Since the Hebb paradigm is thought to rely on working memory and thus attention (Conway & Engle, 1996), one interpretation concerns an OA’s capacity to allocate the necessary attentional resources to carry out the various components of the task. Five studies investigated this proposal. The first three (Article 1) examined attention in a general manner by reducing the amount of attentional resources that a YA could devote to carrying out the visuospatial Hebb supra-span sequence learning task through the implementation of a verbal dual task (DT) procedure. The fourth (Article 2) further investigated the role of attention by using a DT induced at retrieval that overlapped extensively with the requirements (spatial and response features) of the visuospatial Hebb task. The final study (Article 3) aimed to use our previous findings to demonstrate learning among OAs in a visuospatial Hebb learning paradigm in which the motor response was replaced by a verbal response. Our findings confirm that attentional resources employed at the retrieval phase of the task appear to be particularly important for the demonstration of visuospatial sequence learning. The inclusion of a spatial and motor based DT at recall eliminated learning of the repeated sequence in YAs. Interestingly, the learning deficit of OAs was partially eliminated when the motor and spatial requirements at retrieval were reduced. Our findings offer strong support to the contention that supra-span learning of the Hebb type is not altered by the effect of age. However, learning deficits can be observed among OAs when the retrieval component of the task overly taxes attention-related processes. In the case of the visuospatial sequences, the basis of the deficit likely concerns an individual’s capacity to discriminate between responses made to previously presented sequences versus those that need to be made in reaction to the just seen sequence.

Using Hebb’s (1961) paradigm, it has been shown that older adults (OAs) fail to learn recurrent visuospatial supra-span sequence information (Turcotte, Gagnon, & Poirier, 2005); a deficit which has not been demonstrated on verbal versions of the same task or in younger adults (YAs). Since the Hebb paradigm is thought to rely on working memory and thus attention (Conway & Engle, 1996), one interpretation concerns an OA’s capacity to allocate the necessary attentional resources to carry out the various components of the task. Five studies investigated this proposal. The first three (Article 1) examined attention in a general manner by reducing the amount of attentional resources that a YA could devote to carrying out the visuospatial Hebb supra-span sequence learning task through the implementation of a verbal dual task (DT) procedure. The fourth (Article 2) further investigated the role of attention by using a DT induced at retrieval that overlapped extensively with the requirements (spatial and response features) of the visuospatial Hebb task. The final study (Article 3) aimed to use our previous findings to demonstrate learning among OAs in a visuospatial Hebb learning paradigm in which the motor response was replaced by a verbal response. Our findings confirm that attentional resources employed at the retrieval phase of the task appear to be particularly important for the demonstration of visuospatial sequence learning. The inclusion of a spatial and motor based DT at recall eliminated learning of the repeated sequence in YAs. Interestingly, the learning deficit of OAs was partially eliminated when the motor and spatial requirements at retrieval were reduced. Our findings offer strong support to the contention that supra-span learning of the Hebb type is not altered by the effect of age. However, learning deficits can be observed among OAs when the retrieval component of the task overly taxes attention-related processes. In the case of the visuospatial sequences, the basis of the deficit likely concerns an individual’s capacity to discriminate between responses made to previously presented sequences versus those that need to be made in reaction to the just seen sequence.