Marie Pieron - 07/06/2013 - 4 pm

This talk will be given in french, exceptionally

Marie Pieron est doctorante à l'Institut Jean Nicod, sous la direction de Tiziana Zalla. Son travail porte l'exploration visuelle du visage dans le Syndrome d'Asperger.

Titre: "Inhibition de retour saccadique dans les troubles du spectre autistique"
Date, Heure, Salle: 07/06/2013, 4pm, Salle 235A (29 rue d'Ulm)

Abstract: Lorsque nous explorons notre environnement visuel, nous sommes soumis à plus de stimuli que ce que nous sommes en capacité de traiter. Il nous faut donc effectuer une sélection des informations pertinentes en fonction, par exemple, des actions que nous engageons. Un des phénomènes  qui contribue à rendre notre exploration visuelle efficace est l'inhibition de retour. L'inhibition de retour (IOR) est un phénomène d'inhibition automatique servant à nous protéger d'une redirection de l'attention vers un endroit déjà exploré au préalable. Il facilite donc la nouveauté lors de recherche visuelle. Expérimentalement, l'IOR est observé dans une tâche d'orientation spatiale de Posner avec une réponse manuel ou saccadique. Il se caractérise alors par une augmentation de temps de réaction lorsqu'une cible apparait au même endroit qu'un signal apparu précédemment plutôt qu'à une localisation différente. Dans les troubles du spectres autistiques (TSA), des atypies dans le domaine de la perception visuelle ont été retrouvé se traduisant en fonction des tests soit par des déficits  soit par de meilleures performances que les individus typiquement développés. Mottron et Burack (2001) ont d'ailleurs émis l'hypothèse d'un surfonctionnement perceptif pour expliquer ces meilleures performances dans les tâches impliquant un bas-niveau de perception. L'étude du phénomène d'IOR peut apporter des éléments de compréhension sur l'exploration visuelle atypique retrouvée dans cette population.

Asya Passinsky - 17/05/2013 - 4 pm

Asya Passinsky is a PhD student at NYU and a visiting student at the IJN.

Title: "Metaphysics of Social Objects"
Date, Time, Place: 17/05/2013, 4pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin

Abstract: Ordinary experience suggests that under certain circumstances, we can create things like money, boundaries, stocks, governments, nation-states and corporations by mere declaration. But we cannot likewise create other kinds of objects in this way. For example, we can cannot create H2O molecules, trees, tables or numbers by mere declaration. So how is it that we can create social objects in this way? I will argue against a reductivist answer to this creation-by-declaration puzzle which identifes every token social object with a token physical object, and against an eliminativist answer which maintains that social objects do not exist. I will conclude with some speculative remarks about a realist answer to the puzzle.

Anikó Sebestény - 03/05/2013 - 4 pm

Anikó Sebestény is an anthropologist and doctoral student at Nanterre University (France) and Pécs University (Hungary).



Title: "Daily Domestic Offerings versus Tourism in Bali"
Date, Time, Place: 03/05/2013, 4pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin

Abstract:  Is this small offering basket presented daily in every Balinese home a religious „priming device" that contributed to the perpetuation of Balinese religious traditions despite the general presence of tourism?

In this talk, I will present the main ideas of my PhD, a work in progress, on daily offerings in Bali. Drawing on both my education and experience as anthropologist who did "real" fieldwork, and my education in cognitive sciences, I am presenting a case study about Balinese domestic rituals.

Using the anthropological methods, through participant observation, I am analysing how domestic rituals shape domestic ritual geography, "reactivate" domestic altars, create social and economic networks in the neighborhood, and shape the belief in the ancestor's influence on people's life.

To get a clearer image about belief in the aftelife, linked with belief in the ancestors, I chose to use experimental methods. I replicated Astuti and Harris's study (2008) on the effect of religious context on after-life beliefs. Astuti's findings show that in Madagascar, the context priming (a hospital story versus a ritual story) had a significant effect on the mental capacities attributed to the dead. In Bali, I did not find a significant context effect. Instead of claiming that my results go against Astuti's findings, I claim, based on my fieldwork observations, that the daily rituals have a strong context-creating power, stronger than the context-creating prime stories used in Astuti's study.

Approaching the same object – the daily offering ritual – from two angles, on different levels, using social anthropology and cognitive approach, I aim to gain a deep understanding of the complex implications of having offering ritual performed daily in mostly each Balinese home.

I claim that these rituals, creating a strong context effect, also account for the adaptability of Balinese people: daytime, they work for tourists who are mostly atheists. In the evening, they go home and find altars, and offerings. They move successfully between two different contexts, that call for different implication and behaviour.

Reference:

Astuti, R., and Harris, P.L. (2008). Understanding mortality and the life of the ancestors in rural Madagascar. Cognitive Science 32, 713–740.

Luísa Semedo - 29/03/2013 - 4pm

Luísa Semedo received his PhD from the University Paris-Sorbonne. She is an
associate member of the research team of the Institute for Philosophy of Language (IFL) at the New University of Lisbon and a research team member of the IFL project "Cognitive Foundations of the Self".

Title: "Ethics of Empathy: From Theory to Practice"
Date, Time, Place: 29/03/2013, 4pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin

Abstract:  In this talk I will present some of the main ideas of my PhD dissertation entitled “Towards an Ethics of Empathy” and its outcomes, both theoretical and practical. Empathy is an early, universal and flexible faculty which allows us to be affected (emotional empathy, empathic distress, contagion, imitation), to recognize (cognitive empathy, empathic concern, perspective taking, simulation, imagination) and to respond (empathic action, altruism, trust, cooperation, respect) properly to the subjectivity of others. This behavior can range from simple social coordination to a true ethical conduct. I will review and discuss these different components of empathy, and I will argue that there is a necessary link between emotion, cognition and morality. My hypothesis is that we can build a coherent and pragmatic ethics of empathy and to support this purpose I will present some of the most recent, French and international, initiatives in education of empathy and also my own project (in progress), "Philo’Ensemble", an interdisciplinary association that aims to raise awareness among citizens, especially among young people, to the issue of "living together", through the fight against discrimination and the strengthening of social ties.
Please visit: http://www.ethicsofempathy.com/index.html

Margaux Larre-Perez - 22/03/2013 at 4 pm

Margaux Larre-Perez (Institut Jean Nicod & LPP) will be our next speaker. She is jointly supervised by Pierre Jacob and Thérèse Collins.
Title: "Stroop-like interference between structural and functional hand gestures within objects"
Date, Time, Place: 22/03/2013, 4pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin

Abstract: Man-made objects may elicit at least two kinds of hand gestures: structural hand gestures associated with the shape-based properties of objects, and functional hand gestures associated with their typical usage. A number of behavioral studies have examined the relationship between these action classes, but some questions remain unanswered; in particular, whether they are both automatically recruited when viewing a particular object, and if they are, whether they may compete with each other. We adapted a Stroop-like paradigm to assess action representations afforded by man-made objects, and the interference within the same object between its associated structural and functional hand actions. In a practice phase, subjects first learned to associate either a “clench” or a “poke” movement with a given color (green or red). In the test phase, subjects executed these learned movements in response to the color of several objects associated with both hand actions (e.g. a calculator or a soap dispenser) that were displayed on a computer screen. Three different object colorations were presented: the object was entirely red or green (“baseline” condition), or was partially colored in such a way that the color and the colored part were congruent (e.g. a red calculator key or a green calculator body) or incongruent (e.g. the opposite combination). Difference in initiation times between these conditions will shed light on what kinds of gestures are evoked by the visual image of graspable objects and if these gesture representations are automatically elicited.

Joulia Smortchkova - 01/03/2013 at 4 pm

For the next session, Joulia Smortchkova (Institut Jean Nicod) will talk about a work she's been developing with Michael Murez (Institut Jean Nicod & Harvard University).

Title: "Singular Thought: from Object Files to Person Files"
Date, Time, Place: 01/03/2013, 4pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin

Abstract: How do mind and world connect, so that particular things (objects, people, etc.) find their way into the content of our thought? To answer this question is to solve what philosophers call the problem of singular thought. Many singularists claim that to have a non-descriptive thought about some thing is to represent it via a mental file.
Psychologists' notion of an object file resembles philosophers' notion of a file: both serve to represent things independently from their properties. However, an account still needs to be given to connect the existing psychological data with another crucial part of the singularist thesis, viz., that we are able to form acquaintance-based thoughts not just about objects, but also about people.
We argue for a careful extension of the notion of a file, starting from psychologists' narrower notion. We postulate files specially dedicated to the tracking of animated agents, biological entities, and especially, people. We claim a file of this latter kind, which we call a person file, explains our ability to form a singular thought about a person.

Nicolas Delon - 08/02/2013 at 4 pm

Nicolas Delon (Université de Picardie, CURAPP) will be our next speaker. He is currently doing a PhD under the supervision of Sandra Laugier, working on animal ethics.

Title: "Animal ethics goes experimental"
Date, Time, Place: 08/02/2013, 4pm, Salle de Réunion du Pavillon Jardin

Abstract: Animal ethics, like most other subfields of normative ethics, routinely appeals to readers' intuition concerning either real or fictitious cases. However, those appeals have usually had two main shortcomings. First, they often used thought experiments purporting to show that some "speciesist" biases were unwarranted, by using supposedly analogous cases involving humans or alien species. Unfortunately, those cases often display several important disanalogies. Secondly, the intuitions that animal ethics has been relying on haven't yet, as far I know, been properly surveyed. Except for psychologists and sociologists who have already surveyed people's views and behaviors with respect to animals, there's little to be found about the specific responses of the so-called "folk" to the philosophical treatment of human-animal relations.
These shortcomings led me to design a series of experimental studies in order to assess how our conceptions of the moral status of nonhuman animals vary according to different factors (relational, spatial, categorial, species-specific, contextual...). The core hypothesis of this work is that, in contrast to a view that is held to be commonsense by many animal ethicists themselves, moral status is not univocally a function of an entity's intrinsic properties, hence, that extrinsic factors affect judgments concerning the wrongness of some treatments of some animals. The upshot of the survey is not, of course, normative. The most prominent contemporary animal ethicist, Peter Singer, famously rejected the use of (empirically uncovered) intuitions as, at best, irrelevant to morality. But these intuitions are interesting in their own right nonetheless, and, as they're often implicit in animal ethics, it's important to test them. I believe, moreover, that those intuitions should play some role in the assessment of our obligations, if only because we have to know what they are in order to know how to revise them.
The study that I wish to introduce is part of the Experiment Month initiative, sponsored by the CogSci department at Yale University. It has not been launched yet, so I won't have any results to discuss. For the time being, I'd like to present my hypothesis, the design, and the methodology of the study, and to discuss the broader issues of 1) the relevance of intuitions to ethics; 2) the revisionary or conservative use of probing intuitions.