The Human Development Colloquium Series Presents:

How emotions influence mathematics across the lifespan

 

Dr. Patrick Lemaire

Professor of Cognitive Psychology

CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, Member of the Institut Universitaire de France.

 

Bio:

Dr. Patrick Lemaire is full Professor of Cognitive and Developmental Psychology in Aix-

Marseille University (CNRS) and member of the prestigious Institut Universitaire de France.

After he got his training as a Ph.D. in France, University of Burgundy (Dijon) and as a Post-

doc in the USA, Carnegie Mellon University (Pittsburgh, with R.S. Siegler), he obtained a full

and lifetime research position at CNRS, before taking a full professor position at Aix-

Marseille University. He carries out research aimed at understanding how does change occur

in cognition during aging and cognitive development, and how cognition is influenced by a

variety of factors, including emotions. He carries his research mostly in the domain of

arithmetic and uses both behavioral (i.e., solution times, percent errors, video recordings,

verbal protocols, eye movements) and neuro-imaging (e.g., ERP, fMRI, MEG) data. Author or

co-author of 12 books and over 190 papers in peer-review journals, his list of publications can

 

Abstract: Research on the role of emotions on cognition aims at determining if, when, and how

emotions influence cognitive performance. This has been investigated in a number of areas,

including attention, memory, reasoning, decision making, language, and problem solving.

Previous research is limited both empirically and theoretically. Empirically, effects of

emotions have not been much studied in several cognitive domains, including arithmetic.

Theoretically, mechanisms via which emotions affect cognition are unclear. In this talk, after a

brief overview of previous findings on how emotions affect cognition, I will present several

studies that shed important lights on how arithmetic is influenced by emotions. The studies

that I will present have been run in young and older adults, as well as in children aged 8–15.

To make theoretical advances, I propose to examine emotion-cognition interactions and how

these interactions change with participants’ age with a strategy approach. This entails

examining how emotions changes the strategy repertoire (number and types of strategies),

distribution (how often each strategy is used) strategy selection (or choosing the best strategy

on each item) and strategy execution (or relative efficiency of different strategies) while

participants accomplish cognitive task and analyzing which strategy is used and performance

on each item. In the series of studies I am going to present, participants had to accomplish a

variety of arithmetic problem-solving tasks. The data show that emotions influence strategic

aspects of cognitive performance (e.g., negative emotions shrink strategy repertoire and

decrease better strategy selection) and that this influence vary with participants’ age (e.g.,

emotions influence strategy repertoire only in young adults, but not in older adults or children,

but influence strategy execution more in younger than older participants as well as in

children). Such findings help further our understanding of how emotions influence arithmetic

performance as well as how this influence changes during both childhood and adulthood.