Kolinsky, R., Morais, J., Cohen, L., Dehaene-Lambertz, G. & Dehaene, S. (2014). L’influence de l’apprentissage du langage écrit sur les aires du langage/The impact of literacy on the language brain areas. Revue de Neuropsychologie, 6, 173-181.
L’acquisition de la lecture et de l’écriture, ou littératie,constitue vraisemblablement l’un des plus puissants instruments de transformation cognitive et cérébrale que nous acquérons au cours de notre vie. Dans cette revue, nous discutons du fait que, en plus de permettre l’acquisition de nouvelles connaissances (par l’intermédiaire de la lecture) et le stockage extérieur de l’information (via les notes manuscrites, les livres, les ordinateurs, etc.), la littéeatie entraîne trois grands types de changements dans les circuits cérébraux du langage. Nous illustrons le fait que l’apprentissage de l’écrit mène non seulement à une activation des aires du langage parlé par l’écrit, mais aussi à des modifications du traitement du langage parlé lui-même, et ce par deux mécanismes. En effet, la littératie améliore le codage phonologique (dans le planum temporale) et conduit, dans certaines situations d’écoute, à une activation « top-down » des représentations orthographiques (dans le cortex occipito-temporal gauche). En outre, l’acquisition de la littératie s’accompagne de changements anatomiques, notamment dans la connectivité intra- et inter-hémisphérique. Pour finir, nous discutons des implications théoriques et pratiques de ces découvertes pour les neuropsychologues.
Lijima Y., Takano K., Boddez Y., Raes F., Tanno Y. (2017). Negative Self-Referent Thinking is Less Sensitive to Aversive Outcomes in People with Higher Levels of Depressive Symptoms. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, art.nr. 1333.
Ventura, P., Fernandes, T., Cohen, L., Morais, J., Kolinsky, R., & Dehaene, S. (2013). Literacy acquisition reduces the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses. NeuroScience Letters, 554, 105-109.
Writing was invented too recently to have influenced the human genome. Consequently, reading acqui- sition must rely on partial recycling of pre-existing brain systems. Prior fMRI evidence showed that in literates a left-hemispheric visual region increases its activation to written strings relative to illit- erates and reduces its response to faces. Increasing literacy also leads to a stronger right-hemispheric lateralization for faces. Here, we evaluated whether this reorganization of the brain’s face system has behavioral consequences for the processing of non-linguistic visual stimuli. Three groups of adult illiter- ates, ex-illiterates and literates were tested with the sequential composite face paradigm that evaluates the automaticity with which faces are processed as wholes. Illiterates were consistently more holistic than participants with reading experience in dealing with faces. A second experiment replicated this effect with both faces and houses. Brain reorganization induced by literacy seems to reduce the influence of automatic holistic processing of faces and houses by enabling the use of a more analytic and flexible processing strategy, at least when holistic processing is detrimental to the task.
Maes, E., Boddez, Y., Alfei, J. M., Krypotos, A. M., D’Hooge, R., De Houwer, J., & Beckers, T. (2016). The elusive nature of the blocking effect: 15 failures to replicate. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 145, e49-e71.
With the discovery of the blocking effect, learning theory took a huge leap forward, because
blocking provided a crucial clue that surprise is what drives learning. This in turn stimulated the
development of novel association-formation theories of learning. Eventually, the ability to explain
blocking became nothing short of a touchstone for the validity of any theory of learning, including
propositional and other non-associative theories. The abundance of publications reporting a
blocking effect and the importance attributed to it suggest that it is a robust phenomenon. Yet, in
the current paper we report fifteen failures to observe a blocking effect despite the use of
procedures that are highly similar or identical to those used in published studies. Those failures raise
doubts regarding the canonical nature of the blocking effect and call for a reevaluation of the central
status of blocking in theories of learning. They may also illustrate how publication bias influences
our perspective towards the robustness and reliablilty of seemingly established effects in the
psychological literature.
Maes, E., Krypotos, A. M., Boddez, Y., Alfei, J. M, D’Hooge, R., De Houwer, R., & Beckers, T. (in press). Failures to replicate blocking are surprising and informative – Reply to Soto (in press). Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.
The blocking effect has inspired numerous associative learning theories and is widely cited in
the literature. We recently reported a series of 15 experiments that failed to obtain a blocking effect
in rodents. Based on those consistent failures, we claimed that there is a lack of insight into the
boundary conditions for blocking. In his commentary, Soto (in press) argues that contemporary
associative learning theory does provide a specific boundary condition for the occurrence of blocking,
namely the use of same- versus different-modality stimuli. Given that in ten of our 15 experiments
same-modality stimuli were used, he claims that our failure to observe a blocking effect is
unsurprising. We cannot but disagree with that claim, because of theoretical, empirical, and
statistical problems with his analysis. We also address two other possible reasons for a lack of
blocking that are referred to in Soto’s (in press) analysis, related to generalization and salience, and
dissect the potential importance of both. While Soto’s (in press) analyses raises a number of
interesting points, we see more merit in an empirically guided analysis and call for empirical testing
of boundary conditions on blocking.
Maes, E., Vanderoost, E., D’Hooge, R., De Houwer, J., & Beckers, T. (2017). Individual difference factors in the learning and transfer of patterning discriminations. Frontiers in Psychology. 8:1262. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01262
In an associative patterning task, some people seem to focus more on learning an
overarching rule, whereas others seem to focus on acquiring specific relations between the
stimuli and outcomes involved. Building on earlier work, we further investigated which
cognitive factors are involved in feature- versus rule-based learning and generalization. To this
end, we measured participants’ tendency to generalize according to the rule of opposites after
training on negative and positive patterning problems (i.e., A+/B+/AB- and C-/D-/CD+), their
tendency to attend to global aspects or local details of stimuli, their systemizing disposition and
their score on the Raven intelligence test. Our results suggest that while intelligence might have
some influence on patterning learning and generalization, visual processing style and
systemizing disposition do not. We discuss our findings in the light of previous observations
on patterning.
Mertens, G., & De Houwer, J. (in press). Can threat information bias fear learning? Some tentative results and methodological considerations. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology.
Whereas it is widely recognized that both verbal threat information and stimulus pairings
can install strong and persistent fear, few studies have addressed the interaction between these
two pathways of fear. According to the expectancy bias of Davey (1992, 1997), verbal
information can install expectancy biases for aversive events that can result in facilitated fear
learning through stimulus pairings and can delay extinction of fear. However, these predictions
of the expectancy bias account have not been explored fully. Following up on two earlier studies
(Field & Storksen-Coulson, 2007; Ugland, Dyson, & Field, 2013), we investigated the impact of
prior threat information on fear acquisition, extinction and reinstatement. To this aim,
participants received instructions about four unfamiliar animals, two of which that were
described as dangerous whereas the other two were described as harmless. One animal of each
pair was subsequently paired with an electric stimulus. Our results indicated that threat
information resulted in stronger fear responses prior to fear conditioning and in delayed
extinction of fear. However, these effects of instructions were not very pronounced and not
found on all measures of fear. We discuss several methodological and procedural considerations
that may modulate the effects of (verbally installed) expectancy biases.
Mertens, G., Van Dessel, P., & De Houwer, J. (2018). The contextual malleability of approach-avoidance training effects: Approaching or avoiding fear conditioned stimuli modulates effects of approach-avoidance training. Cognition & Emotion, 32, 341-349.
Previous research showed that the repeated approaching of one stimulus and avoiding of another
stimulus typically leads to more positive evaluations of the former stimuli. In the current study,
we examined whether approach and avoidance training (AAT) effects on evaluations of neutral
stimuli can be modulated by introducing a regularity between the approach-avoidance actions
and a positive or negative (feared) stimulus. In an AAT task, participants repeatedly approached
one neutral non-word and avoided another neutral non-word. Half of the participants also
approached a negative fear-conditioned stimulus (CS+) and avoided a conditioned safe stimulus
(CS-). The other half of the participants avoided the CS+ and approached the CS-. Whereas
participants in the avoid CS+ condition exhibited a typical AAT effect, participants in the
approach CS+ condition exhibited a reversed AAT effect (i.e., they evaluated the approached
neutral non-word as more negative than the avoided non-word). These findings provide evidence
for the malleability of the AAT effect when strongly valenced stimuli are approached or avoided.
We discuss the practical and theoretical implications of our findings.
Meulders A., Boddez Y., Blanco F., Van Den Houte M., Vlaeyen J. (2018). Reduced selective learning in fibromyalgia patients versus healthy controls. Pain.
Moors, A., Boddez, Y., & De Houwer, J. (2017). The power of goal-directed processes in the causation of emotional and other actions. Emotion Review, 9, 310-318.
Standard dual process models in the action domain postulate that stimulus-driven
processes are responsible for suboptimal behavior because they take them to be rigid and
automatic and therefore the default. We propose an alternative dual process model in which
goal-directed processes are the default instead. We then transfer the dual process logic from
the action domain to the emotion domain. This reveals that emotional action tendencies are
often attributed to stimulus-driven processes. Our alternative model submits that emotional
action tendencies can also be caused by goal-directed processes. We evaluate the type of
empirical evidence required for validating our model and we consider implications of our
model for behavior change, encouraging strategies focused on the expectancies and values of
action outcomes.
