Sciences, littérature et arts de la scène avec Nicola Clayton et Clive Wilkins

Nicola Clayton sera à l'ENS les 3 et 4 mai. Elle donnera une conférence dans le cadre du colloquium du DEC, et deux conférences accompagnée de l'artiste Clive Wilkins.

Nicola Clayton est professeur de cognition comparée au département de psychologie de l'université de Cambridge. Elle a été élue membre du Royal Society en 2010.
Ses travaux sur le fonctionnement de la pensée chez les animaux et les enfants l'ont amenée à réévaluer les capacités cognitives des animaux, en particuliers chez les oiseaux et l'ont conduite à une théorie selon laquelle l'intelligence évolue de façon autonome chez les singes et les corbeaux. Nicola Clayton a créé de nouvelles procédures pour l'étude expérimentale de la mémoire et de l'imagination chez les animaux et a étudié les liens avec la mémoire et la conscience humaine, ainsi que le développement de ces compétences chez les jeunes enfants.
Nicola Clayton est par ailleurs passionnée de danse. Fascinée par les liens entre la science et la danse, elle a été nommée Scientifique en résidence au sein de la compagnie de danse "Rambert Dance Company" où elle collabore avec le directeur artistique, Mark Baldwin.
Mais sa collaboration la plus récente est celle qu'elle a développée avec l'artiste Clive Wilkins, une collaboration née d'un intérêt commun pour l'imagination et ses répercussions sur la conscience, l'identité et la mémoire.
Clive Wilkins est un artiste en résidence au département de psychologie de l'Université de Cambridge. Il est écrivain, artiste peintre, danseur et magicien. Ses peintures sont régulièrement exposées dans des galeries londoniennes. Dans son dernier roman "The Moustachio Quartet", il s'interroge sur les aspects de la conscience et de la réalité dans le miasme de l'être.
Nicola et Clive explorent les liens entre leurs disciplines. Ils ont fondé ensemble "The Capture Thought", une collaboration artistique et scientifique qui explore le voyage mental dans le temps et l'expérience subjective de la pensée. Il en découle une série de conférences uniques à travers lesquelles ils présentent leurs travaux.

Mardi 3 mai 2016, 11h30, salle Prestige 1, 29 rue d'Ulm
Nicola Clayton
Ways of Thinking From Crows To Children And Back Again

Abstract :
This article reviews some of the recent work on the remarkable cognitive capacities of food-caching corvids. The focus will be on their ability to think about other minds and other times, and tool-using tests of physical problem solving. Research on developmental cognition suggests that young children do not pass similar tests until they are at least four years of age in the case of the social cognition experiments, and eight years of age in the case of the tasks that tap into physical cognition. This developmental trajectory seems surprising. Intuitively, one might have thought that the social and planning tasks required more complex forms of cognitive process, namely Mental Time Travel and Theory of Mind. Perhaps the fact that children pass these tasks earlier than the physical problem-solving tasks is a reflection of cultural influences. Future research will hope to identify these cognitive milestones by starting to develop tasks that might go some way towards understanding the mechanisms underlying these abilities in both children and corvids, to explore similarities and differences in their ways of thinking.

Reference :
Clayton, N. S. (2014). EPS Mid Career Award Lecture. Ways of Thinking: From Crows to Children and Back Again. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 68, 209-241.


Mardi 3 mai 2016, 15h, Amphithéâtre Jaurès, 29 rue d'Ulm
Nicola Clayton et Clive Wilkins
The creative navigator's compass. Memory and perception and how we know where we are

Abstract :
If we could tell you where you were going and how you could get there, would you want to know?

Imagine a crystal ball that could anticipate the future: would you want to gaze into it, and if you did, what do you think you would see? Would you see yourself looking into it to know your personal future, the futures of your loved ones, or the society of which you are a part, or would you be looking for an overview of the great schema of things? Is it the case that any of these are fundamentally different in the way that they affect our perception of the world? In making an assessment of any future we may perceive, it’s all too easy to make the assumption that what we imagine and remember are accurate reflections of reality. Many of our greatest deceptions evolve out of such a faulty supposition.

In essence, the chances are that if we were able to look into the crystal ball we would be unlikely to make any sense of it anyway because our experiences are subjective. This has two consequences. The first is that they can shimmer and change, and be altered by our current point of view. The second is that these alternative realities are constrained by the fact that we don’t see all that can be seen, our memories are not an accurate repository of what happened in the past, and our thoughts of the future are often equally inaccurate and ill conceived because of these constraints on perception and memory.

Nicky and Clive, a scientist and artist respectively, explore the complex relationships between memory, perception and human experience. Join them for a fascinating interactive presentation that incorporates science, literature, and the performing arts.


Mercredi 4 mai 2016, 15h, salle Langevin, 29 rue d'Ulm
Nicola Clayton et Clive Wilkins
Mental Time Travel and the Moustachio quartet

Abstract :
Mental time travel allows us to re-visit our memories and imagine future scenarios, and this is why memories are not only about the past—they are also prospective. These episodic memories are not a fixed store of what happened, however; they are reassessed each time they are revisited and depend on the sequence in which events unfold. In this lecture we shall explore the complex relationships between memory and human experience, including through a series of novels ‘The Moustachio Quartet’ that can be read in any order. To do so we shall integrate evidences from science and the arts to explore the subjective nature of mental time travel, arguing that these capacities evolved primarily for prospection as opposed to retrospection. Furthermore, we shall question the notion that mental time travel is a uniquely human construct, and argue that some of the best evidence for the independent evolution of mental time travel comes from our distantly related avian cousins, the corvids, that cache food for the future and rely on long-lasting and highly accurate memories of what, where and when they stored their stashes of food.

FINANCEMENTS