Corrigendum: The impact of pedagogical agents' gender on academic learning: a systematic review

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.3389/frai.2022.862997.].

Toward a New Approach to Investigate the Role of Working Memory in Stereotype Threat Effects

Stereotype threat arises when the activation of negative stereotypes about a group impairs performance of stigmatized individuals on stereotype relevant tasks. There is ample evidence that stereotype threat leads to performance detriments by consuming executive resources. Several studies indeed showed that working memory (WM) mediates stereotype threat effects among young adults. More recently, researchers have sought to understand whether the same mechanisms underlie age-based stereotype threat, but findings are mixed regarding the role of WM and some authors rather favor a motivational explanation based on regulatory fit. The present review critically appraises the empirical support for distinct forms of stereotype threat effects mediated by distinct mechanisms. We propose a novel approach based on one of the most recent WM models, the time-based resource sharing model, to evaluate the impact of stereotype threat on attentional resources in WM among both young and older adults.

The Impact of Pedagogical Agents' Gender on Academic Learning: A Systematic Review

Virtual learning environments often use virtual characters to facilitate and improve the learning process. These characters, known as pedagogical agents, can take on different roles, such as tutors or companions. Research has highlighted the importance of various characteristics of virtual agents, including their voice or non-verbal behaviors. Little attention has been paid to the gender-specific design of pedagogical agents, although gender has an important influence on the educational process. In this article, we perform an extensive review of the literature regarding the impact of the gender of pedagogical agents on academic outcomes. Based on a detailed review of 59 articles, we analyze the influence of pedagogical agents' gender on students' academic self-evaluations and achievements to answer the following questions: (1) Do students perceive virtual agents differently depending on their own gender and the gender of the agent? (2) Does the gender of pedagogical agents influence students' academic performance and self-evaluations? (3) Are there tasks or academic situations to which a male virtual agent is better suited than a female virtual agent, and vice versa, according to empirical evidence? (4) How do a virtual agent's pedagogical roles impact these results? (5) How do a virtual agent's appearance and interactive capacities impact these results? (6) Are androgynous virtual agents a potential solution to combatting gender stereotypes? This review provides important insight to researchers on how to approach gender when designing pedagogical agents in virtual learning environments.

Socio-Emotional Competencies and School Performance in Adolescence: What Role for School Adjustment?

There is growing evidence in the literature of positive relationships between socio-emotional competencies and school performance. Several hypotheses have been used to explain how these variables may be related to school performance. In this paper, we explored the role of various school adjustment variables in the relationship between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades, using a weighted network approach. This network approach allowed us to analyze the structure of interrelations between each variable, pointing to both central and mediatory school and socio-emotional variables within the network. Self-reported data from around 3,400 French vocational high school students were examined. This data included a set of interpersonal socio-emotional competencies (cognitive and affective empathy, socio-emotional behaviors and collective orientation), school adjustment measures (adaptation to the institution, school anxiety, self-regulation at school, and self-perceived competence at school) as well as grades in mathematics and French language. The results showed that self-regulation at school weighted the most strongly on the whole network, and was the most important mediatory pathway. More specifically, self-regulation mediated the relationships between interpersonal socio-emotional competencies and school grades.

Cultural Differences in Susceptibility to Stereotype Threat: France versus India

OBJECTIVES

Negative aging stereotypes make older adults perform below their true potential in a number of cognitive domains. This phenomenon, known as Age-Based Stereotype Threat, is currently viewed as a powerful factor contributing to an overestimation of cognitive decline in normal aging. However, age-based stereotype threat has been investigated almost exclusively in Western countries. Whether this phenomenon is universal or culture-specific is unknown.

METHOD

Here, we first ran a pilot study (N = 106) in which we assessed French and Indian participants' attitudes towards aging. Then, we assessed stereotype threat effects on arithmetic problem-solving performance and strategies in French and Indian older adults (N = 104).

RESULTS

We found that French older adults have more negative implicit attitudes towards aging than Indian older adults. We also found that culture modulates age-based stereotype threat effects. Whereas French older adults experienced stereotype threat on both selection and execution of strategies on all arithmetic problems, Indian older adults experienced this threat only in their strategy selection on harder problems. Most interestingly, cultural differences emerged on arithmetic problems under stereotype threat condition, where otherwise no cultural differences were found in the control condition.

DISCUSSION

Our findings have important implications for understanding how cultural contexts change aging effects on human cognition and age-related difference in cognitive performance.

Highlighting and Reducing the Impact of Negative Aging Stereotypes During Older Adults' Cognitive Testing

As life expectancy increases, aging has become a major health challenge, resulting in a huge effort to better discriminate between normal and pathological cognitive decline. It is thus essential that cognitive tests and their administration are as fair as possible. However, an important source of bias during cognitive testing comes from negative aging stereotypes that can impair the memory performance of older adults and inflate age differences on cognitive tasks. The fear of confirming negative aging stereotypes creates an extra pressure among older adults which interferes with their intellectual functioning and leads them to perform below their true abilities. Here, we present a protocol that highlights simple but efficient interventions to alleviate this age-based stereotype threat effect. The first study showed that simply informing older participants about the presence of younger participants (threat condition) led older adults to underperform on a standardized memory test compared with younger participants, and that this performance difference was eliminated when the test was presented as age-fair (reduced-threat condition). The second study replicated these findings on short cognitive tests used to screen for predementia in clinical settings and showed that teaching older adults about stereotype threat inoculated them against its effects. These results provide useful recommendations about how to improve older adults' memory assessment both in Iab studies and in clinical settings.

Ageing stereotypes and prodromal Alzheimer's disease (AGING): study protocol for an ongoing randomised clinical study

INTRODUCTION

The number of older people diagnosed with amnestic mild cognitive impairment (aMCI), the prodromal state of Alzheimer's disease (AD), is increasing worldwide. However, some patients with aMCI never convert to the AD type of dementia, with some remaining stable and others reverting to normal. This overdiagnosis bias has been largely overlooked and gone unexplained. There is ample evidence in the laboratory that negative ageing stereotypes (eg, the culturally shared belief that ageing inescapably causes severe cognitive decline) contribute to the deteriorating cognitive performances of healthy older adults, leading them to perform below their true abilities. The study described here is intended to test for the first time whether such stereotypes also impair patients' cognitive performances during neuropsychological examinations in memory clinics, resulting in overdiagnosis of aMCI.

METHODS AND ANALYSIS

The ongoing study is a 4-year randomised clinical trial comparing patients' physiological stress and cognitive performances during neuropsychological testing in memory clinics. A total of 260 patients attending their first cognitive evaluation will be randomised to either a standard condition of test administration, assumed here to implicitly activate negative ageing stereotypes or a reduced-threat instruction condition designed to alleviate the anxiety arising from these stereotypes. Both groups will be tested with the same test battery and stress biomarkers. For 30 patients diagnosed with aMCI in each group (n=60), biomarkers of neurodegeneration and amyloidopathy will be used to distinguish between aMCI with normal versus abnormal AD biomarkers. A 9-month follow-up will be performed on all patients to identify those whose cognitive performances remain stable, deteriorate or improve.

ETHICS AND DISSEMINATION

This protocol has been approved by the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety and the Sud-Est I French Ethics Committee (2017-A00946-47). Results will be published in peer-reviewed journals.

TRIAL REGISTRATION NUMBER

NCT03138018.

Travelers' Actual and Subjective Knowledge about Risk for Ebola Virus Disease

To determine travelers’ actual and subjective knowledge about risk for Ebola virus disease, we surveyed travelers from France. Actual knowledge did not prevent irrational perceptions or promote safe behavior. Rather, readiness to adopt protective behavior depended on subjective knowledge and overconfidence in ability to self-protect.

Does social context impact metacognition? Evidence from stereotype threat in a visual search task

While recent studies have emphasized the role of metacognitive judgments in social interactions, whether social context might reciprocally impact individuals’ metacognition remains an open question. It has been proposed that such might be the case in situations involving stereotype threat. Here, we provide the first empirical test of this hypothesis. Using a visual search task, we asked participants, on a trial-by-trial basis, to monitor the unfolding and accuracy of their search processes, and we developed a computational model to measure the accuracy of their metacognition. Results indicated that stereotype threat enhanced metacognitive monitoring of both outcomes and processes. Our study thus shows that social context can actually affect metacognition.

Negative Aging Stereotypes Disrupt both the Selection and Execution of Strategies in Older Adults

BACKGROUND

Age-based cognitive deficits are exacerbated by stereotype threat effects (i.e., the threat of being judged as cognitively incapable due to aging). We tested whether age-based stereotype threat effects can occur via impair- ing older adults' ability to select the best strategy and/or to execute strategies efficiently.

METHODS

Older adults (age range: 64.3-89.5 years) were randomly assigned to a stereotype threat or control condition before taking an episodic memory task. They encoded pairs of concrete words and of abstract words, with either a repetition or an imagery strategy, and then took a cued-recall task. Whereas participants in experiment 1 could choose between these two strategies, those of experiment 2 were forced to use either the repetition or the imagery strategy.

RESULTS

Our findings showed that age-based stereotype threat disrupts both the selection and execution of the most efficient, but also most resource-demanding, imagery strategy, and that these stereotype threat effects were stronger on concrete words.

CONCLUSION

Our findings have important implications to further understand age-based (and other) stereotype threat effects, and how noncognitive factors modulate age-related changes in human cognition.

Development of Gender Typicality and Felt Pressure in European French and North African French Adolescents

Trajectories of gender identity were examined from Grade 6 (M_age  = 11.9 years) to Grade 9 in European French (n = 570) and North African French (n = 534) adolescents, and gender and ethnic group differences were assessed in these trajectories. In Grade 6, boys of both ethnic groups reported higher levels of gender typicality and felt pressure for gender conformity than girls. European French girls and boys and North African French girls reported decreasing gender typicality from Grade 6 to Grade 9, whereas North African French boys did not change. Felt pressure decreased among girls, did not change in European French boys, and increased in North African French boys. Ethnic and gender differences in gender identity development are discussed.

Negative Aging Stereotypes Impair Performance on Brief Cognitive Tests Used to Screen for Predementia

Objectives

There is today ample evidence that negative aging stereotypes impair healthy older adults' performance on cognitive tasks. Here, we tested whether these stereotypes also decrease performance during the screening for predementia on short cognitive tests widely used in primary care.

Method

An experiment was conducted on 80 healthy older adults taking the Mini Mental State Examination (MMSE) and the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MoCA) under Threat or Reduced-threat condition.

Results

Stereotype threat significantly impaired older adults' performance on both tests, resulting in 40% of older adults meeting the screening criteria for predementia, compared with 10% in Reduced-threat condition (MMSE and MoCA averaged).

Discussion

Our research highlights the influence of aging stereotypes on short cognitive tests used to screen for predementia. It is of critical importance that physicians provide a threat-free testing environment. Further research should clarify whether this socially induced bias may also operate in secondary care by generating false positives.

Stereotype Threat Alters the Subjective Experience of Memory

There is now evidence that negative age-related stereotypes about memory reduce older adults' memory performance, and inflate age differences in this domain. Here, we examine whether stereotype threat may also influence the basic feeling that one is more or less able to remember. Using the Remember/Know paradigm, we demonstrated that stereotype threat conducted older adults to a greater feeling of familiarity with events, while failing to retrieve any contextual detail. This finding indicates that stereotype threat alters older adults' subjective experience of memory, and strengthens our understanding of the mechanisms underlying stereotype threat effects.

Methodologies for measuring travelers' risk perception of infectious diseases: A systematic review

Numerous studies in the past have stressed the importance of travelers' psychology and perception in the implementation of preventive measures. The aim of this systematic review was to identify the methodologies used in studies reporting on travelers' risk perception of infectious diseases. A systematic search for relevant literature was conducted according to Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines. There were 39 studies identified. In 35 of 39 studies, the methodology used was that of a knowledge, attitude and practice (KAP) survey based on questionnaires. One study used a combination of questionnaires and a visual psychometric measuring instrument called the 'pictorial representation of illness and self-measurement" or PRISM. One study used a self-representation model (SRM) method. Two studies measured psychosocial factors. Valuable information was obtained from KAP surveys showing an overall lack of knowledge among travelers about the most frequent travel-associated infections and associated preventive measures. This methodological approach however, is mainly descriptive, addressing knowledge, attitudes, and practices separately and lacking an examination of the interrelationships between these three components. Another limitation of the KAP method is underestimating psychosocial variables that have proved influential in health related behaviors, including perceived benefits and costs of preventive measures, perceived social pressure, perceived personal control, unrealistic optimism and risk propensity. Future risk perception studies in travel medicine should consider psychosocial variables with inferential and multivariate statistical analyses. The use of implicit measurements of attitudes could also provide new insights in the field of travelers' risk perception of travel-associated infectious diseases.

Risk perceptions of MSF healthcare workers on the recent Ebola epidemic in West Africa

Healthcare workers (HCW) in general are considered to be at high risk during epidemics. Their training for Ebola provided by Médecins sans frontières (MSF) is presently based on imparting factual information, which does not necessarily translate into knowledge or appropriate practices. We aimed to understand the importance of risk perception during training. A total of 130 MSF-trained HCW traveling to Africa during the Ebola epidemic of 2014–2015 participated in this longitudinal cohort study. Their baseline knowledge was good but did not significantly increase after training except for minor symptoms, case fatality rate and wearing personal protective equipment as a preventive measure. Additionally, they underestimated their likelihood for contracting Ebola compared to their colleagues of same age and sex, and despite their high-risk status, they showed little concern about contracting Ebola during their mission. Our findings suggest that the use of individualized risk feedback during training in appraising erroneous perceptions will increase adherence to preventive measures.

On the power of autobiographical memories: from threat and challenge appraisals to actual behaviour

Autobiographical memories are a major feature of mental life in humans. However, research on the influence of autobiographical recall on actual behaviour is scarce. We predicted and found that general memories of failure and specific memories of success resulted in worse performance than general memories of success and specific memories of failure. This performance pattern was mediated by task appraisal, suggesting that autobiographical memories (of failure and success) impact performance by shaping the perception of the upcoming task. Combined with the fact that these effects occurred even when the content of autobiographical memories was unrelated to the upcoming task, the present research represents an important step forward in understanding how autobiographical recall influences actual behaviour.

Stereotype Threat Strengthens Automatic Recall and Undermines Controlled Processes in Older Adults

The threat of being judged stereotypically (stereotype threat) may impair memory performance in older adults, thereby producing inflated age differences in memory tasks. However, the underlying mechanisms of stereotype threat in older adults or other stigmatized groups remain poorly understood. Here, we offer evidence that stereotype threat consumes working memory resources in older adults. More important, using a process-dissociation procedure, we found, for the first time, that stereotype threat undermines the controlled use of memory and simultaneously intensifies automatic response tendencies. These findings indicate that competing models of stereotype threat are actually compatible and offer further reasons for researchers and practitioners to pay special attention to age-related stereotypes during standardized neuropsychological testing.

Relationship of sociocultural factors and academic self-esteem to school grades and school disengagement in North African French adolescents

The present study was designed to provide an integrated understanding of school grades and psychological disengagement among ethnic minority students. For that purpose, perceived parental involvement, acculturation orientations, and ethnic identity were simultaneously investigated in order to discover their respective contribution to grades among these students. Additionally, it was tested whether academic self-esteem mediated the relationship between grades and psychological disengagement. North African French junior high-school students completed a questionnaire assessing their ethnic identity, acculturation orientations, perceptions of parental involvement, academic self-esteem and trend toward the devaluing and discounting facets of psychological disengagement. Their grades in the main courses were obtained from the school records. Although perceived parental involvement displayed the strongest contribution to grades, acculturation orientations and ethnic identity still predicted grades, after controlling for parental involvement. Academic self-esteem mediated the influence of grades on both facets of disengagement, while this pattern was less clear for the devaluing process.

The role of acculturation in suicidal ideation among second-generation immigrant adolescents in France

This study explored the contributions of sociocultural and psychopathological factors to suicidal ideation among adolescents. A sample of 292 French high school students with an immigrant background completed a questionnaire assessing suicidal ideation, borderline personality traits, depressive symptoms, parental attachment, life events, acculturation orientations, ethnic identity, cannabis and alcohol consumption, socioeconomic status and academic failure. Although stressful life events, depressive symptoms, and individualism were risk factors, and attachment to parents a protective factor for both boys and girls, some gender differences emerged. Borderline traits (risk factor), assimilation and marginalization (both protective factors) were significant predictors only among girls.

Relative contributions of acculturation and psychopathological factors to cannabis use among adolescents from migrant parents

Immigrant adolescents and adolescents born of immigrant parents are at increased risk of substance use which has been linked to difficulties in acculturation processes. However very few studies have examined the role of the different acculturation strategies and none of them have controlled for relevant psychopathological and socio-familial factors. The aim of this study was to investigate the role of acculturation in cannabis use in a sample of adolescents born of immigrant parents taking into account potential confounding variables. A sample of 292 high school students born in France from at least one foreign parent completed a questionnaire assessing cannabis use, acculturation orientations, ethnic identity and the most relevant potential confounders (depressive symptoms, sensation seeking, borderline and psychopathic traits, alcohol and tobacco use, parental attachment, life events, socioeconomic status and academic achievement). A regression analysis showed that acculturation orientations and ethnic identity explained a significant part of the variance in the frequency of cannabis use. Individualism, integration and assimilation were negatively associated with the frequency of cannabis use suggesting they might serve as protective factors.

In search of the big fish: investigating the coexistence of the big-fish-little-pond effect with the positive effects of upward comparisons

Blanton, Buunk, Gibbons, and Kuyper (1999) and Huguet, Dumas, Monteil, and Genestoux (2001) found that children nominated a social comparison target who slightly outperformed them in class with a beneficial effect on course grades - an assimilation effect, but with no effects on self-evaluation. However, big-fish-little-pond effect (BFLPE) research has shown that attending a high-ability school has a negative effect on academic self-concept--a contrast effect. To resolve this apparent conflict, the present investigation (1) tested the BFLPE in the Netherlands and France, using nationally representative samples (Study 1) and (2) further analysed (using more sophisticated analyses) the Dutch (Blanton et al.) study (Study 2) and the French (Huguet et al.) study including new French data (Study 3), to examine whether the BFLPE coexisted with, or was moderated by, the beneficial impact of upward comparisons. In support of the BFLPE, all studies found the negative effects of school- or class-average ability on self-evaluation, demonstrating that these assimilation and contrast effects can coexist.

THE SELF-PROTECTIVE PROPERTIES OF INGROUP COMPARISONS FOR LOW SOCIOECONOMIC STATUS STUDENTS: A PILOT STUDY

A pilot study, the first step for work to be completed later, explored whether low socioeconomic status (SES) students restrict social comparison to their ingroup (the other low SES students) to self-protect. After receiving false performance feedback on a memory test, low and high SES students were asked to select another student and to predict his/her test score. In contrast to expectations, participants' dominant choice was to select high SES targets, regardless of their own SES. Likewise, participants' achievement level affected neither target selection nor score prediction. Both limitations of this study and methodological improvements are suggested and discussed.