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).

Mark Sheskin - 2014/01/31

Date: Friday 31st January

Time: 11:30 am

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

Speaker: Mark Sheskin (IJN)

Title: “The Origins of Fairness: Experiments with Children and Monkeys”

Abstract: Recent research has argued that surprisingly advanced fairness judgments can be found early in childhood development and even in some nonhuman primates. I present new experiments showing the opposite: situations in which monkeys do not care about fairness and young children show spiteful preferences against fairness. Which set of research should you believe? Both, of course! In a review including both sets of research, I will discuss the similarities and differences in the fairness of these populations. The interesting question becomes about which aspects of adult fairness can be found in these other populations, and how the initial state matures into the adult one.

Workshop on the anthropology of psychological essentialism - Charles Stépanoff & Denis Regnier - 2014/01/24

Next session of JNEI will consist of a workshop entirely dedicated to the anthropology of psychological essentialism. Our two speakers will be Charles Stépanoff (EPHE) and Denis Regnier (IJN):

Anthropology of psychological essentialism

Date: Friday 24rd January

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Time: 11:30 – 12:45
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Charles Stépanoff (EPHE)

Title: “Understanding individuality: About individual essences and categories”

Abstract: Why do we essentialize social categories? Why do people consider belonging of individuals to certain categories as innate, inalterable and giving a lot of information about them (about their character, their vices, or their skills)? Social essentialism has been interpreted as the result of a transfer from folkbiology to social groups (Atran, Boyer, Gil-White): we essentialize social categories because we mistakenly treat them as biological species. This hypothesis, called “analogical transfer”, is based on the theory of the modularity of the mind. Other students interpret essentialism as a domain-general mode of understanding that permits interpreting causality in many domains independently from biology (Gelman, Hirschfeld). Ethnography can help to untangle empirically these questions. Among Tuvans (Southern Siberia), belonging to the category of shamans is innate and inalterable. However, their category is not conceptualized as a biological species, for shamans are supposed to eat each other. I advocate for the hypothesis of individual essentialism that helps to understand essentialization of high ranked categories (e.g. aristocracy), and leads to discard the “analogical transfer” hypothesis.

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Time: 12:45  – 14:00
Place: Conference room, Pavillon Jardin - 29, rue d'Ulm
Speaker: Denis Regnier (IJN)

Title: “Clean people, unclean people: History, cognition and the essentialization of  ‘slaves’ among the Betsileo”

Abstract: In the southern highlands of Madagascar, Betsileo descendants of ‘commoners’ (olompotsy) essentialize slave descendants: they think that slave descendants have an ‘inner essence’ that makes them what they are, cannot be cleansed and will be passed on to their children, no matter what they do. This case of psychological essentialism, as strong as it is among the Betsileo, raises the questions of why, when and how such an essentialization has taken place, since there is evidence that slaves in pre-abolition times (i.e., before 1896), although deemed ‘unclean’, were not essentialized – or only weakly essentialized – by ‘clean’ and free people.  The paper will discuss Betsileo history and ethnography, as well as recent research on the essentialism of social categories to suggest an answer to these questions.

Guillaume Dezecache, 20/12/2013, 11am

Date: Friday 20th December

Time: 11 am

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

Speaker: Guillaume Dezecache (IJN)

Title: “Studies on emotional propagation in humans: The cases of fear and joy”

Abstract: Crowd psychologists of the 19th and 20th centuries have left us with the idea that emotions are so contagious that they can cause large groups of individuals to rapidly and spontaneously converge on an emotional level. Good illustrations of this claim include situations of crowd panic where large movements of escape are thought to emerge through local interactions, and without any centralized coordination. Our studies sought to investigate the propagation of two allegedly contagious emotions, i.e., fear and joy. I will present two theoretical and two empirical studies that have investigated, at two different levels of analysis, the phenomenon of emotional propagation of fear and joy: firstly, at a proximal level of analysis (the how-question), I discuss the potential mechanisms underlying the transmission of these emotions in crowds, and the extent to which emotional transmission can be considered analogous to a contagion process. Secondly, at an evolutionary/ultimate level of analysis (the why-question), I ask why crowd members seem to be so inclined to share their emotional experience of fear and joy with others. I present a study showing that the transmission of fear might be facilitated by a tendency to modulate one’s involuntary fearful facial reactions according to the informational demands of conspecifics, suggesting that the biological function of spontaneous fearful reactions might be communication of survival-value information to others. Finally, I discuss the implications of these studies for the broader understanding of emotional crowd behavior.

Sam Wilkinson, 13/12/2013, 11 am

Date: Friday 13rd December

Time: 11 am

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

Speaker: Sam Wilkinson (Durham Univ.)

Title: “Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and the Anticipatory Nature of Experience”

Abstract: My aim is to formulate an account of auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVHs) occurring in the context of schizophrenia, which is both informed by empirical findings and does justice to the subjective experience of voice-hearing. I argue that AVHs cannot be fully understood in isolation from their broader experiential context. They are symptomatic of global experiential changes, and any complete account of them needs to understand these changes. I start by attempting to formulate a clearer statement of what is involved, phenomenologically speaking, by looking closely at first-person patient reports. I then explain these phenomenological changes in terms of recent work on “hierarchical predictive processing” (HPP) (see Clark 2013, for a review). I present data suggesting that schizophrenia involves predictive processing going wrong. I then show how this predictive processing view supports a recent distinction between “inner speech hallucinations”, which occur in quiet contexts where attention is inwardly directed, and “hypervigilance hallucinations”, which occur in loud contexts where attention is outwardly directed (Dogdson and Gordon 2009).