Katharina Helming - 2014/04/18 – 11:30 am

Date: Friday 18th April

Time: 11:30 am

Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm

Speaker: Katharina Helming (IJN)

Title: “Making sense of early false-belief understanding”

Abstract: The topic of this talk is the puzzle about early belief-ascription: Young children demonstrate spontaneous false-belief understanding, but they fail elicited-response false-belief tasks. Based on recent converging evidence, a pragmatic framework to solve this puzzle will be introduced. Young children do understand the contents of others’ false belief, but they are overwhelmed when they must simultaneously make sense of two distinct actions: the instrumental action of a mistaken agent and the experimenter’s communicative action. I will discuss predictions of this account and present preliminary data supporting it.

Guillaume Dumas - 2014/04/04 - 3:30 pm

Date: Friday 4th April

Time: 3:30 pm – 5:00 pm

Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm

Speaker: GuillaumeDumas (Florida Atlantic University)

Title: “Second-person neuroscience and complex systems approach of social interaction”

Abstract: This talk will present empirical investigations of both human-human and human-machine interactions, with a focus on the neurobiological mechanisms of social cognition and the multi-scale modeling of neural, behavioral and social coordination dynamics. While several theories have been proposed to infer the link between neurobiology and social psychology, the dynamical and reciprocal components of human interaction are still poorly explored. This is especially true for social neuroscience, where recording simultaneously the brain activity from several subjects remains difficult. This is nevertheless possible with a neuroimaging methodology called "hyperscanning". I will first present how the combination of situated social paradigms with hyperscanning recordings allows to relate social patterns at the behavioral level with the emergence of specific patterns at the brain level (Dumas et al. PLoS ONE 2010; Dumas et al. Front. Hum. Neurosci. 2012). The related intra- and inter-brain patterns reflect different aspects of social interaction, such as interactional synchrony, anticipation of other's actions and co-regulation of turn-taking. Then, I will present biologically inspired numerical simulations can reproduce some of the results and how it points out a potential role of the human brain anatomical structure in the facilitation of sensorimotor coordination and thus may partly account for our propensity to enter in couplings with others (Dumas et al. PLoS ONE 2012). Finally, I will present a recent tool called the Human Dynamic Clamp, which consists in an artificial agent integrating equations of human motion at the neurobehavioral level. A human and this "virtual partner" are then reciprocally coupled in real-time, which allow controlling both its intrinsic dynamics and the coupling with the human, while maintaining the continuous flow of interaction. This generalizes previous empirical paradigms and also provides a Turing-test for theoretical models of social cognition. Preliminary results already showed an effect of the coupling on the collective behavior and attribution of intention. In conclusion, I will compare these results with other published studies (Froese et al. 2014), and discuss their place in the current theoretical debate about the constitutive role of social interaction for social cognition (Gallotti 2012; Gallotti & Frith 2013).