Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
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1997 research outputs found
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Solipsistic and inter-subjective attitude reports. From representational to volitionals
No full textInternational audienceThe utterability of bouletic attitude reports is understood as sensitive to semantic features of their prejacent. Since Heim's seminal work, much has been said on the constraints relative to beliefs and plausibility. Recently, the debate has focused on the distinction between action-oriented desire reports, in contrast to mere desire reports (Condoravdi & Lauer, 2016). Describing the first use, theoreticians have encoded in the semantics of want the requirement for structures of desire compatible with planning and action. These, in addition to ingredients referring to responsibility, have shown the proximity of some desire reports with intention reports. Here we understand these two interpretations as following from a fundamental difference between solispistic and inter-subjective profiles of the attitudes across the epistemic (representational) and the bouletic domain (preferential attitudes). Revisiting the classical Hamblinian view, we propose that attitudes feature speechact like content, which present p for uptake in the common ground. We argue that the uptake with repsentational is 'confirmation' and that with bouletics it is 'realization'. In our analysis, actionability follows as a felicity condition on the inter-subjective use of bouletics and WANT in particular. Focusing on a variety of bouletic expressions in Italian, we also derive their temporal constraints from this more general distinction between private and public attitudes
Listening strategies and inter-individual variability in stop consonant perception
No full textInternational audienc
Human-environment feedback and the consistency of proenvironmental behavior
No full textInternational audienceAddressing global environmental crises such as anthropogenic climate change requires the consistent adoption of proenvironmental behavior by a large part of a population. Here, we develop a mathematical model of a simple behavior-environment feedback loop to ask how the individual assessment of the environmental state combines with social interactions to influence the consistent adoption of proenvironmental behavior, and how this feeds back to the perceived environmental state. In this stochastic individual-based model, individuals can switch between two behaviors, ‘active’ (or actively proenvironmental) and ‘baseline’, differing in their perceived cost (higher for the active behavior) and environmental impact (lower for the active behavior). We show that the deterministic dynamics and the stochastic fluctuations of the system can be approximated by ordinary differential equations and a Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type process. By definition, the proenvironmental behavior is adopted consistently when, at population stationary state, its frequency is high and random fluctuations in frequency are small. We find that the combination of social and environmental feedbacks can promote the spread of costly proenvironmental behavior when neither, operating in isolation, would. To be adopted consistently, strong social pressure for proenvironmental action is necessary but not sufficient—social interactions must occur on a faster timescale compared to individual assessment, and the difference in environmental impact must be small. This simple model suggests a scenario to achieve large reductions in environmental impact, which involves incrementally more active and potentially more costly behavior being consistently adopted under increasing social pressure for proenvironmentalism
Measuring vagueness and subjectivity in texts: from symbolic to neural VAGO
No full textInternational audienceWe present a hybrid approach to the automated measurement of vagueness and subjectivity in texts. We first introduce the expert system VAGO, we illustrate it on a small benchmark of fact vs. opinion sentences, and then test it on the larger French press corpus FreSaDa to confirm the higher prevalence of subjective markers in satirical vs. regular texts. We then build a neural clone of VAGO, based on a BERT-like architecture, trained on the symbolic VAGO scores obtained on FreSaDa. Using explainability tools (LIME), we show the interest of this neural version for the enrichment of the lexicons of the symbolic version, and for the production of versions in other languages
Zero the hero: Evidence for involvement of the ventromedial prefrontal cortex in affective bias for free items
No full textInternational audienceRecent evidence from psycho-economics shows that when the price of an item decreases to theextent that it becomes available for free, one can observe a remarkable increase of subjective utilitytoward this item. This phenomenon, which is not observed for any other price but zero, has beentermed the zero-price effect (ZPE). The ZPE is attributed to an affective heuristic where the positiveaffect elicited by the free status of an item provides a mental shortcut biasing choice towards thatitem. Given that the ZPE relies on affective processing, a key role of the ventromedial prefrontalcortex (vmPFC) has been proposed, yet neuroscientific studies of the ZPE remain scarce. This studyaimed to explore the role of the vmPFC in the ZPE using a novel, within-subject assessment inparticipants with either an acquired (lesion patients) or degenerative (behavioural-variantfrontotemporal dementia patients) lesion of the vmPFC, and age-matched healthy controls. Allparticipants were asked to make a series of choices between pairs of items that varied in price. Onechoice trial involved an equal decrease of both item prices, such that one of the items was pricedzero. In contrast to controls, both vmPFC-lesion and behavioural-variant frontotemporal dementiapatients showed marked reductions in zero-related changes of preference in pairs of gift-cards, butnot for pairs of food items. Our findings suggest that affective evaluations driving the ZPE are alteredin patients with focal or degenerative damage to the vmPFC. This supports the notion of a key role ofthe vmPFC in the ZPE and, more generally, the importance of this region in value-based affectivedecision-making. Our findings also highlight the potential utility of affective heuristic tasks in futureclinical assessments
Punitive justice serves to restore reciprocal cooperation in three small-scale societies
No full textNational audienceFines, corporal punishments, and other procedures of punitive justice recur across small-scale societies. Although they are often assumed to enforce group norms, we here propose the relation-restoration hypothesis of punitive justice, according to which punitive procedures function to restore dyadic cooperation and curtail conflict between offender and victim following violations of reciprocal obligations. We test this hypothesis's predictions using observations of justice systems in three small-scale societies. We code ethnographic reports of 97 transgressions among Kiowa equestrian foragers (North America); analyze a sample of 302 transgressions among Mentawai horticulturalists (Indonesia); and review retributive procedures documented among Nuer pastoralists (South Sudan). Consistent with the relation-restoration hypothesis, we find that third-party punishment is rare; that most third-party involvement aims at resolving conflicts; that costs paid by offenders serve to achieve forgiveness by repairing victims; that punitive justice is accompanied by ceremonial procedures aimed at limiting conflict and restoring goodwill; and that failures to impose costs contribute to a decline in reciprocal cooperation. Although we document rare instances of third-party punishment among the Kiowa (6.6% of offenses), punitive justice more often serves as restorative justice, appeasing victims' urge for revenge while not overly harming offenders' interests to ensure reconciliation
Memory Monitoring and Control in Japanese and German Preschoolers
No full textInternational audiencePrior studies explored the early development of memory monitoring and control. However, little work has examined cross-cultural similarities and differences in metacognitive development in early childhood. In the present research, we investigated a total of 100 Japanese and German preschool-aged children’s memory monitoring and control in a visual perception task. After seeing picture items, some of which were repeated, children were presented with picture pairs, one of which had been presented earlier and the other was a novel item. They then were asked to identify the previously presented picture. Children were also asked to evaluate their confidence about their selection, and to sort the responses to be used for being awarded with a prize at the end of the test. Both groups similarly expressed more confidence in the accurately remembered items than in the inaccurately remembered items, and their sorting decision was based on their subjective confidence. Japanese children’s sorting more closely corresponded to memory accuracy than German children’s sorting, however. These findings were further confirmed by a hierarchical Bayesian estimation of metacognitive efficiency. The present findings therefore suggest that early memory monitoring and control have both culturally similar and diverse aspects. The findings are discussed in light of broader sociocultural influences on metacognition
Why monsters are dangerous
No full textInternational audienceMonsters and other imaginary animals have been conjured up by a wide range of cultures. Can their popularity be explained, and can their properties be predicted? These were long-standing questions for structuralist or cognitive anthropology, as well as literary studies and cultural evolution. The task is to solve the puzzle raised by the popularity of extraordinary imaginary animals, and to explain some cross-cultural regularities that such animals present — traits like hybridity or dangerousness. The standard approach to this question was to first investigate how human imagination deals with actually existing animals. Structuralist theory held that some animals are particularly "good to think with”. According to Mary Douglas’s influential hypothesis, this was chiefly true of animals that disrupt intuitive classifications of species— the “monsters-as-anomalies” account. But this hypothesis is problematic, as ethnobiology shows that folk classifications of biological species are so plastic that classificatory anomalies can be disregarded. This led cognitive anthropologists to propose alternative versions of the “monsters as anomalies” account. Parallel to this, a second account of monsters —“monsters-as-predators”— starts from the importance of predator detection to our past survival and reproduction, and argues that dangerous features make animals “good to think with”, and should be over-represented in imaginary animals. This paper argues that both accounts understand something about monsters that the other account cannot explain. We propose a synthesis of these two accounts, which attempts to explain why the two most characteristic aspects of monsters, anomalousness and predatoriness, tend to go together