Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
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The Cultural Evolution of Information Seeking
No full textInternational audienceThe mechanisms of selection, assimilation and transmission at work in cultural accumulation need to include evaluative processes for detecting informational lacunae and repair mechanisms. Novelty, interest, learnability of alternative concepts and practices need to be permanently monitored at the individual and at the group level. It is proposed that the evaluative mechanisms that control cultural accumulation are themselves subject to cultural evolution. This article outlines a plausible sequence of evolutionary steps from curiosity-based exploration to inquisitive communication and to collective epistemic deliberation. Procedural metacognition, based on affective monitoring, regulates curiosity and early forms of inquisitive communication. Explicit metacognition, based on transmitted concepts, rules and practices regulates collective epistemic deliberation. It successively expands across cultures the epistemic sensitivity to a range of distinct norms such as evidentiality, consistency, explanatory power and consensuality
Scaling up interactive argumentation by providing counterarguments with a chatbot
No full textInternational audienceDiscussion is more convincing than standard, unidirectional messaging, but its interactive nature makes it difficult to scale up. We created a chatbot to emulate the most important traits of discussion. A simple argument pointing out the existence of a scientific consensus on the safety of genetically modified organisms (GMOs) already led to more positive attitudes towards GMOs, compared with a control message. Providing participants with good arguments rebutting the most common counterarguments against GMOs led to much more positive attitudes towards GMOs, whether the participants could immediately see all the arguments or could select the most relevant arguments in a chatbot. Participants holding the most negative attitudes displayed more attitude change in favour of GMOs. Participants updated their beliefs when presented with good arguments, but we found no evidence that an interactive chatbot proves more persuasive than a list of arguments and counterargument
How Fair is Gender-Fair Language? Insights from Gender Ratio Estimations in French
No full textInternational audienceHeated societal debates in various countries concern the use of gender-fair language, meant to replace the generic use of grammatically masculine forms. Advocates and opponents of gender-fair language disagree onamong other thingsthe question of whether masculine forms leave women underrepresented in people's minds. We investigated the influence of linguistic form on the mental representations of gender in French. Participants read a short text about a professional gathering and estimated the percentages of men and women present at the gathering. Results showed higher estimates of the percentage of women in response to two gender-fair forms relative to the masculine form. Comparisons with normed data on people's perception of real-world gender ratios additionally showed that the gender-fair forms removed or reduced a male bias for neutral-and female-stereotyped professions, respectively, yet induced a female bias for male-stereotyped professions. Thus, gender-fair language increases the prominence of women in the mind, but has varying effects on consistency, i.e., the match with default perceptions of real-world gender ratios
Policy Search with Rare Significant Events: Choosing the Right Partner to Cooperate with
No full textInternational audienceThis paper focuses on a class of reinforcement learning problems where significant events are rare and limited to a single positive reward per episode. A typical example is that of an agent who has to choose a partner to cooperate with, while a large number of partners are simply not interested in cooperating, regardless of what the agent has to offer. We address this problem in a continuous state and action space with two different kinds of search methods: a gradient policy search method and a direct policy search method using an evolution strategy. We show that when significant events are rare, gradient information is also scarce, making it difficult for policy gradient search methods to find an optimal policy, with or without a deep neural architecture. On the other hand, we show that direct policy search methods are invariant to the rarity of significant events, which is yet another confirmation of the unique role evolutionary algorithms has to play as a reinforcement learning method
Motor coordination and strategic cooperation in joint action
No full textInternational audienceNaturalistic joint action usually requires both motor coordination and strategic cooperation. However, these two fundamental processes have systematically been studied independently. We devised a novel collaborative task, combining different levels of motor noise with different levels of strategic noise, to determine whether sense of agency (the experience of control over an action) reflects the interplay between these low-level (motor) and high-level (strategic) processes. We also examined how dominance in motor control could influence prosocial behaviours. We found that self-agency was particularly dependent on motor cues while joint agency was particularly dependent on strategic cues. We suggest that the prime importance of strategic cues for joint agency reflects the co-representation of co-agents’ interests during the task. Furthermore, we observed a reduction of prosocial strategies in agents who exerted a dominant motor control over the joint action, showing that the strategic dimension of human interactions is also reliant on low-level motor features
Exploring Valence in Judgments of Taste
No full textInternational audienceJudgments of taste are often assumed to be evaluative, in the sense of expressing either a positive or a negative assessment of the object under evaluation. However, the evaluative character of predicates of personal taste (PPTs) has received relatively little attention from a semantic point of view. Our aim is to fill out this lacuna. We show that PPTs do not divide neatly into positively and negatively valenced terms. Instead, we suggest that many PPTs, such as 'surprising' and 'intense', are neutral: they are underspecified for their valence and, depending on the context, can give rise to a positive, a negative, or an ambivalent evaluation. We investigate how such neutral PPTs differ from evaluative PPTs, and how they differ from certain other terms that are neither positive nor negative, such as 'average'. We use a two-pronged approach. First, we propose two novel linguistic tests that serve as diagnostics to distinguish the class of neutral PPTs from valenced PPTs, and we use corpus examples to corroborate the tests. Second, we use information from pre-existing psychological norms of valence to further explore the class of adjectives that we hypothesize are neutral
When instrumental inference hides behind seemingly arbitrary conventions
No full textInternational audienceWe review recent evidence that game rules, rules of etiquette, and supernatural beliefs, that the authors see as “ritualistic” conventions, are in fact shaped by instrumental inference. In line with such examples, we contend that cultural practices that may appear, from the outside, to be devoid of instrumental utility, could in fact be selectively acquired and preserved because of their perceived utility
Attitudes toward choice with incomplete preferences: An experimental study
No full textInternational audienceWe present an experiment to test different individual attitudes toward choice, such as preference for flexibility, choice aversion, betweenness and choice neutrality. Unlike other related experimental papers, we want to analyze whether different choice attitudes can coexist for the same subject, depending on the characteristics of the choice set she is facing. In particular, our main hypothesis is that the presence of incomparability among the alternatives in the choice set, and the time at which such incomparability is solved, affect crucially the kind of attitude towards choice that the subject will exhibit. We find that, indeed, choice attitudes are not homogeneous across choice sets, yet they are conditional on the preferences over the alternatives. We also find some evidence supporting that subjects tend to value heuristically sets as a whole
Presuppositions
No full textInternational audienceThis chapter presents the most influential linguistic approaches to presupposition. Going beyond the traditional analyses of the problem of presupposition projection, it also considers recent developments in linguistics that link the analysis of presuppositions to general processes of cognition and reasoning, such as attention, probabilistic reasoning, theory of mind, information structure, attitudes and perspectival structure. I discuss some outstanding questions: whether presuppositions form one coherent group or should be thought of as different types of phenomena, why we have presuppositions at all, and why we see the presuppositions that we see (aka the triggering problem). Overall, the chapter stresses the need to consider the intricacies of the interaction of presuppositions with the broader discourse context