Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
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1997 research outputs found
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Biology, Society, or Choice: How Do Non-Experts Interpret Explanations of Behaviour?
No full textInternational audienceExplanations for human behaviour can be framed in many different ways, from the social-structural context to the individual motivation down to the neurobiological implementation. We know comparatively little about how people interpret these explanatory framings, and what they infer when one kind of explanation rather than another is made salient. In four experiments, UK general-population volunteers read vignettes describing the same behaviour, but providing explanations framed in different ways. In Study 1, we found that participants grouped explanations into 'biological', 'psychological' and 'sociocultural' clusters. Explanations with different framings were often seen as incompatible with one another, especially when one belonged to the 'biological' cluster and the other did not. In Study 2, we found that exposure to a particular explanatory framing triggered inferences beyond the information given. Specifically, psychological explanations led participants to assume the behaviour was malleable, and biological framings led them to assume it was not. In Studies 3A and 3B, we found that the choice of explanatory framing can affect people's assumptions about effective interventions. For example, presenting a biological explanation increased people's conviction that interventions like drugs would be effective, and decreased their conviction that psychological or socio-political interventions would be effective. These results illuminate the intuitive psychology of explanations, and also potential pitfalls in scientific communication. Framing an explanation in a particular way will often generate inferences in the audience-about what other factors are not causally important, how easy it is to change the behaviour, and what kinds of remedies are worth considering-that the communicator may not have anticipated and might not intend. a n o p e n a c c e s s j o u r n a
Croire le vrai, éviter l'erreur
No full textNational audienceL'objet de cet essai est de revisiter le débat entre William James et William Clifford touchant la certitude comme norme de la croyance. Alors que Clifford soutient qu'une croyance fondée sur une évidence insuffisante est fautive, James soutient que pour parvenir à croire le vrai quand l'évidence est incertaine, il faut admettre une part d'erreur et de croyances fausses. À l'appui de la thèse de James contre l'agnosticisme supposé de Clifford, je propose un argument inspiré de la théorie de la détection du signal, qui constitue une théorie bayésienne de l'utilité espérée de nos réponses en situation d'incertitude. Cependant, la notion même d'utilité espérée permet aussi d'interpréter différemment l'intuition centrale de Clifford. Ce que Clifford condamne avant tout, ce n'est pas de former une croyance faillible sur la base d'une évidence incertaine, mais de mal évaluer le lien entre cette incertitude et ses conséquences pratiques
A Somatosensory Computation That Unifies Limbs and Tools
No full textInternational audienceIt is often claimed that tools are embodied by their user, but whether the brain actually repurposes its body-based computations to perform similar tasks with tools is not known. A fundamental computation for localizing touch on the body is trilateration. Here, the location of touch on a limb is computed by integrating estimates of the distance between sensory input and its boundaries (e.g., elbow and wrist of the forearm). As evidence of this computational mechanism, tactile localization on a limb is most precise near its boundaries and lowest in the middle. Here, we show that the brain repurposes trilateration to localize touch on a tool, despite large differences in initial sensory input compared with touch on the body. In a large sample of participants, we found that localizing touch on a tool produced the signature of trilateration, with highest precision close to the base and tip of the tool. A computational model of trilateration provided a good fit to the observed localization behavior. To further demonstrate the computational plausibility of repurposing trilateration, we implemented it in a three-layer neural network that was based on principles of probabilistic population coding. This network determined hit location in tool-centered coordinates by using a tool’s unique pattern of vibrations when contacting an object. Simulations demonstrated the expected signature of trilateration, in line with the behavioral patterns. Our results have important implications for how trilateration may be implemented by somatosensory neural populations. We conclude that trilateration is likely a fundamental spatial computation that unifies limbs and tools
Robots and Resentment: Commitments, Recognition and Social Motivation in HRI
No full textInternational audienc
Seeing inferences: brain dynamics and oculomotor signatures of non-verbal deduction
No full textInternational audienceWe often express our thoughts through words, but thinking goes well beyond language. Here we focus on an elementary but basic thinking process, disjunction elimination, elicited by elementary visual scenes deprived of linguistic content, describing its neural and oculomotor correlates. We track two main components of a nonverbal deductive process: the construction of a logical representation (A or B), and its simplification by deduction (not A, therefore B). We identify the network active in the two phases and show that in the latter, but not in the former, it overlaps with areas known to respond to verbal logical reasoning. Oculomotor markers consistently differentiate logical processing induced by the construction of a representation, its simplification by deductive inference, and its maintenance when inferences cannot be drawn. Our results reveal how integrative logical processes incorporate novel experience in the flow of thoughts induced by visual scenes
The ABC‐D of animal linguistics: are syntax and compositionality for real?
No full textInternational audienceIn several animal species, an alarm call (e.g. ABC notes in the Japanese tit Parus minor ) can be immediately followed by a recruitment call (e.g. D notes) to yield a complex call that triggers a third behaviour, namely mobbing. This has been taken to be an argument for animal syntax and compositionality (i.e. the property by which the meaning of a complex expression depends on the meaning of its parts and the way they are put together). Several additional discoveries were made across species. First, in some cases, animals respond with mobbing to the order alarm–recruitment but not to the order recruitment–alarm . Second, animals sometimes respond similarly to functionally analogous heterospecific calls they have never heard before, and/or to artificial hybrid sequences made of conspecific and heterospecific calls in the same order, thus adding an argument for the productivity of the relevant rules. We consider the details of these arguments for animal syntax and compositionality and argue that, with one important exception (Japanese tit ABC‐D sequences), they currently remain ambiguous: there are reasonable alternatives on which each call is a separate utterance and is interpreted as such (‘trivial compositionality’). More generally, we propose that future studies should argue for animal syntax and compositionality by explicitly pitting the target theory against two deflationary analyses: the ‘only one expression’ hypothesis posits that there is no combination in the first place, for example just a simplex ABCD call; while the ‘separate utterances’ hypothesis posits that there are separate expressions (e.g. ABC and D ), but that they form separate utterances and are neither syntactically nor semantically combined
Formal Models at the Core
No full textInternational audienceThe grammatical paradigm used to be a model for entire areas of cognitive science. Its primary tenet was that theories are axiomatic‐like systems. A secondary tenet was that their predictions should be tested quickly and in great detail with introspective judgments. While the grammatical paradigm now often seems passé, we argue that in fact it continues to be as efficient as ever. Formal models are essential because they are explicit, highly predictive, and typically modular. They make numerous critical predictions, which must be tested efficiently; introspective judgments do just this. We further argue that the grammatical paradigm continues to be fruitful. Within linguistics, implicature theory is a recent example, with a combination of formal explicitness, modularity, and interaction with experimental work. Beyond traditional linguistics, the grammatical paradigm has proven fruitful in the study of gestures and emojis; literature (“Free Indirect Discourse”); picture semantics and comics; music and dance cognition; and even reasoning and concepts. We argue, however, that the grammatical paradigm must be adapted to contemporary cognitive science. Computational methods are essential to derive quantitative predictions from formal models (Bayesian pragmatics is an example). And data collection techniques offer an ever richer continuum of options, from introspective judgments to large‐scale experiments, which makes it possible to optimize the cost/benefit ratio of the empirical methods that are chosen to test theories
Reciprocal contracts – not competitive acquisition – explain the moral psychology of ownership
No full textInternational audienceAbstract We applaud Boyer's attempt to ground the psychology of ownership partly in a cooperative logic. In this commentary, we propose to go further and ground the psychology of ownership solely in a cooperative logic. The predictions of bargaining theory, we argue, completely contradict the actual features of ownership intuitions. Ownership is only about the calculation of mutually beneficial, reciprocal contracts
Il mare come territorio: equilibrio, proiezione ed esposizione marina nei Paesi del mondo
No full textInternational audienceWe are concerned with the territorial interpretation of EEZs in order to highlight the points of balance and imbalance in territorial distribution on a planetary scale. The research node that motivates us is as follows: if the sea is considered as a territory, how do marine territorial divisions reflect the power structures related to terrestrial territorial divisions? What are the balances and imbalances between sea and land? What does it mean to be a maritime power? How does marine extension change the balance? The basic data we consider are a state's land area (non-maritime), its sea area expressed in terms of its EEZ, its population, and the length of its coastline. These data allow us to define certain indices by which we can sort the various forms of expression of "territorial power" (land or sea) and highlight imbalances
The cognitive advantages of the notebook
No full textInternational audienceAbstract Notebooks are widely used in a large number of professional and everyday life contexts. The notebook has been widely mentioned in the context of distributed cognition, the extended mind hypothesis and the study of cognitive artefacts. Despite its ubiquity and almost paradigmatic status, to date, there is no dedicated analysis of the notebook qua cognitive artefact, to explain its success and its resilience. Our aim is to fill this gap in the literature by studying a set of cognitive advantages of the notebook. For our analysis, we employ the methodological framework of distributed cognition. Using this framework, we find a series of cognitive advantages at both an individual and at a group level. At an individual level, these include external non-biological memory, the consolidation of long-term biological memory encoding, effects on attention modulation, an enhancement in metacognition and the graphication of thought. At the group level, the cognitive advantages include collaboration, the transference of content from one user to another, group-level metacognition, coordination, and the transformation of the overall epistemological setting in which notebook use takes place