Middle childhood—conventionally going from about 6–11 years of age—is a crucial yet underappreciated phase of human development. On the surface, middle childhood may appear like a slow-motion interlude between the spectacular transformations of infancy and early childhood and those of adolescence. In reality, this life stage is anything but static: the transition from early to middle childhood heralds a global shift in cognition, motivation, and social behavior, with profound and wide-ranging implications for the development of personality, sex differences, and even psychopathology.

/pdf/middle-childhood-an-evolutionary-developmental-synthesis-1zowk9tevn.pdf

Middle Childhood: An Evolutionary-Developmental Synthesis

Sex differences in visuospatial abilities are long debated. Men generally outperform women, especially in wayfinding or learning a route or a sequence of places. These differences might depend on women's disadvantage in underlying spatial competences, such as mental rotation, and on the strategies used, as well as on emotions and on self-belief about navigational skills, not related to actual skill-levels. In the present study, sex differences in visuospatial and navigational working memory in emotional contexts were investigated. Participants' mood was manipulated by background music (positive, negative or neutral) while performing on the Corsi Block-tapping Task (CBT) and Walking Corsi (WalCT) test. In order to assess the effectiveness of mood manipulation, participants filled in the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule before and after carrying out the visuospatial tasks. Firstly, results showed that after mood induction, only the positive affect changed, whereas the negative affect remained unconfounded by mood and by sex. This finding is in line with the main effect of 'group' on all tests used: the positive music group scored significantly higher than other groups. Secondly, although men outperformed women in the CBT forward condition and in the WalCT forward and backward conditions, they scored higher than women only in the WalCT with the negative background music. This means that mood cannot fully explain sex differences in visuospatial and navigational working memory. Our results suggest that sex differences in the CBT and WalCT can be better explained by differences in spatial competences rather than by emotional contexts.

Sex differences in visuospatial and navigational working memory: the role of mood induced by background music

Imaginary worlds are extremely successful. The most popular fictions produced in the last decades contain such a fictional world. They can be found in all fictional media, from novels (e.g., Lord of The Ring, Harry Potter) to films (e.g., Star Wars, Avatar), video games (e.g., The Legend of Zelda, Final Fantasy), graphic novels (e.g., One piece, Naruto) and TV series (e.g., Star Trek, Game of Thrones), and they date as far back as ancient literature (e.g., the Cyclops Islands in The Odyssey, 850 BCE). Why such a success? Why so much attention devoted to nonexistent worlds? In this article, we propose that imaginary worlds co-opt our preferences for exploration, which have evolved in humans and non-human animals alike, to propel individuals toward new environments and new sources of reward. Humans would find imaginary worlds very attractive for the very same reasons, and under the same circumstances, as they are lured by unfamiliar environments in real life. After reviewing research on exploratory preferences in behavioral ecology, environmental aesthetics, neuroscience, and evolutionary and developmental psychology, we focus on the sources of their variability across time and space, which we argue can account for the variability of the cultural preference for imaginary worlds. This hypothesis can therefore explain the way imaginary worlds evolved culturally, their shape and content, their recent striking success, and their distribution across time and populations.

Why Imaginary Worlds?: The psychological foundations and cultural evolution of fictions with imaginary worlds

Objective Several authors have proposed that the cerebellum has an important role in functions of higher order as a general mode of sequence detection, independently from the nature of the information. The aim of this study was to verify whether the cerebellum mediates the processing of navigational sequential information and to determine whether it is influenced by the modality of the stimuli presentation. Method We tested 12 cerebellar patients and 12 healthy age-matched participants in 2 comparable navigational tasks (Walking Corsi Test and the Magic Carpet) requiring to memorizing a sequence of spatial locations. The 2 tasks differ each other for the modality of stimuli presentation: in the Walking Corsi Test the sequence is shown by an examiner that walks on the carpet, whereas in the Magic Carpet it is shown by a computer that lights up the tiles in the sequence. We hypothesize that different mental processes are implicated between the Walking Corsi Test and the Magic Carpet. Indeed, whereas watching the examiner, who performs the sequence on the carpet, allows the patient to simulate the action mentally in the Walking Corsi Test, such simulation cannot be triggered in the Magic Carpet. Results Our results showed that cerebellar patients obtained scores significantly lower than control participants only in the Magic Carpet. Conclusions We interpreted the patients' performance as a specific deficit in detecting and ordering single independent stimuli as a sequence, when the maintenance of stimulus-response associations is more demanding. (PsycINFO Database Record

Does the cerebellum contribute to human navigation by processing sequential information

Spatial navigation tasks reveal small differences between normal and pathological aging and may thus disclose potential neuropsychological predictors of neurodegenerative diseases. The aim of our study was to investigate which navigational skills are compromised in the early phase of pathological aging as well as the extent to which they are compromised. We performed an extensive neuropsychological evaluation based on working memory and learning tasks (i.e., Corsi Block-Tapping Test and Walking Corsi Test) involving both reaching and navigational vista spaces. We also assessed spatial navigation skills in the real world by asking participants to perform route-learning and landmark-recognition tasks. We conducted a cross-sectional study on nineteen patients with a diagnosis of mild cognitive impairment (MCI) who displayed either an isolated memory deficit (single-domain amnestic MCI, MCIsd; N = 3) or a memory deficit associated with deficits in other cognitive functions (multi-domain MCI, MCImd; N = 16) as well as on nineteen healthy control participants. The groups' performances were compared by means of mixed factorial ANOVA and two-sample t-tests. We found that patients with MCI performed worse than controls, especially when they were required to learn spatial positions within the navigational vista space. Route-learning within the real environment was also impaired whereas landmark-recognition was spared. The same pattern of results emerged in the MCImd subgroup. Moreover, single case analyses on MCIsd patients revealed a dissociation between learning of spatial positions within navigational vista space and within reaching space. These results suggest that topographical learning is compromised in the early phase of MCIsd and MCImd and that spatial navigation tasks may be used to better characterize topographical disorientation in MCI patients as well as for the early diagnosis of pathological aging.

/pdf/is-losing-one-s-way-a-sign-of-cognitive-decay-topographical-iqjzu5yf3s.pdf

Is Losing One's Way a Sign of Cognitive Decay? Topographical Memory Deficit as an Early Marker of Pathological Aging.

The ability to learn complex environments may require the contribution of different types of working memory. Therefore, we investigated the development of different types of working memory (navigational, reaching, and verbal) in 129 typically developing children. We aimed to determine whether navigational working memory develops at the same rate as other types of working memory and whether the gender differences reported in adults are already present during development. We found that navigational working memory is less developed than both verbal and reaching working memory and that gender predicts performance only for navigational working memory. Our results are in line with reports that children made significantly more errors in far space than adults, showing that near space representation develops before far space representation.

Development of navigational working memory: evidence from 6- to 10-year-old children.

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Development of navigational working memory: evidence from 6- to 10-year-old children.