Chambon V, Farrer C, Pacherie E, Jacquet PO.,Leboyer M, Zalla T., Dec 28, 2016 Reduced sensitivity to social priors during action prediction in adults with autism spectrum disorders, Cognition

Abstract:
An extensive amount of evidence has documented a diminished ability to predict and understand other people’s action in individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASD). Recently, two theoretical accounts, the “Hypo-priors” and the “Aberrant precision” hypotheses, have suggested that attenuated Bayesian priors or an imbalance of the precision ascribed to sensory evidence relative to prior expectations may be responsible for the atypical perceptual experience and difficulties with action understanding in ASD. In the present study, we aimed to directly investigate whether difficulties in the appreciation of others’ intentions can be accounted for by abnormal interaction between these two types of information: (i) the sensory evidence conveyed by movement kinematics, and (ii) the observer’s expectations, acquired from past experience or derived from prior knowledge. To test this hypothesis, we contrasted the ability to infer Non-Social and Social intentions in adults with and without ASD, using a series of tasks in which both sensory evidence and prior expectations were manipulated. The results showed that attenuated effect of prior expectations in ASD individuals does not result from a generalized impairment in mentalizing, but one confined to social intentions. Attenuated priors in the social domain predicted the severity of clinical symptoms in the area of social interaction. Importantly, however, we found that reduced priors in the social domain could be compensated by ASD through observational learning, i.e. through deriving statistical regularities from observed behaviours. This capacity to balance reduced social expectations by learning inversely correlated with the severity of repetitive and stereotyped behaviours. Collectively, these findings suggest that adults with ASD exhibit a disturbance in the inferential mechanism that integrates sensory evidence into prior beliefs to produce accurate inferences about other people’s intentions.

Drugowitsch Jan, Wyart Valentin, Devauchelle Anne D., Koechlin Etienne., Dec 21, 2016, Computational Precision of Mental Inference as Critical Source of Human Choice Suboptimality, Neuron.

Abstract:
Making decisions in uncertain environments often requires combining multiple pieces of ambiguous information from external cues. In such conditions, human choices resemble optimal Bayesian inference, but typically show a large suboptimal variability whose origin remains poorly understood. In particular, this choice suboptimality might arise from imperfections in mental inference rather than in peripheral stages, such as sensory processing and response selection. Here, we dissociate these three sources of suboptimality in human choices based on combining multiple ambiguous cues. Using a novel quantitative approach for identifying the origin and structure of choice variability, we show that imperfections in inference alone cause a dominant fraction of suboptimal choices. Furthermore, two-thirds of this suboptimality appear to derive from the limited precision of neural computations implementing inference rather than from systematic deviations from Bayes-optimal inference. These findings set an upper bound on the accuracy and ultimate predictability of human choices in uncertain environments.

Fani Koukouli, Marie Rooy, Dimitrios Tziotis, Kurt A. Sailor, Heidi C. O’Neill, Josien Levenga, Mirko Witte, Michael Nilges, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Charles A. Hoeffer, Jerry A. Stitzel, Boris S. Gutkin, David A. DiGregorio & Uwe Maskos, (2017) Nicotine reverses hypofrontality in animal models of addiction and schizophrenia. Nature Medicine. DOI: 10.1038/nm.4274

Résumé :
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) underlies higher cognitive processes1 that are modulated by nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (nAChR) activation by cholinergic inputs2. PFC spontaneous default activity is altered in neuropsychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia—a disorder that can be accompanied by heavy smoking. Recently, genome-wide association studies (GWAS) identified single-nucleotide polymorphisms (SNPs) in the human CHRNA5 gene, encoding the α5 nAChR subunit, that increase the risks for both smoking and schizophrenia. Mice with altered nAChR gene function exhibit PFC-dependent behavioral deficits but it is unknown how the corresponding human polymorphisms alter the cellular and circuit mechanisms underlying behavior. Here we show that mice expressing a human α5 SNP exhibit neurocognitive behavioral deficits in social interaction and sensorimotor gating tasks. Two-photon calcium imaging in awake mouse models showed that nicotine can differentially influence PFC pyramidal cell activity by nAChR modulation of layer II/III hierarchical inhibitory circuits. In α5-SNP-expressing and α5-knockout mice, lower activity of vasoactive intestinal polypeptide (VIP) interneurons resulted in an increased somatostatin (SOM) interneuron inhibitory drive over layer II/III pyramidal neurons. The decreased activity observed in α5-SNP-expressing mice resembles the hypofrontality observed in patients with psychiatric disorders, including schizophrenia and addiction. Chronic nicotine administration reversed this hypofrontality, suggesting that administration of nicotine may represent a therapeutic strategy for the treatment of schizophrenia, and a physiological basis for the tendency of patients with schizophrenia to self-medicate by smoking

C. Pelofi, V. de Gardelle, P. Egré, D. Pressnitzer, January 2, 2017, Interindividual variability in auditory scene analysis revealed by confidence judgements. Royal society publishing

Abstract:
Because musicians are trained to discern sounds within complex acoustic scenes, such as an orchestra playing, it has been hypothesized that musicianship improves general auditory scene analysis abilities. Here, we compared musicians and non-musicians in a behavioural paradigm using ambiguous stimuli, combining performance, reaction times and confidence measures. We used ‘Shepard tones’, for which listeners may report either an upward or a downward pitch shift for the same ambiguous tone pair. Musicians and non-musicians performed similarly on the pitch-shift direction task. In particular, both groups were at chance for the ambiguous case. However, groups differed in their reaction times and judgements of confidence. Musicians responded to the ambiguous case with long reaction times and low confidence, whereas non-musicians responded with fast reaction times and maximal confidence. In a subsequent experiment, non-musicians displayed reduced confidence for the ambiguous case when pure-tone components of the Shepard complex were made easier to discern. The results suggest an effect of musical training on scene analysis: we speculate that musicians were more likely to discern components within complex auditory scenes, perhaps because of enhanced attentional resolution, and thus discovered the ambiguity. For untrained listeners, stimulus ambiguity was not available to perceptual awareness.

This article is part of the themed issue ‘Auditory and visual scene analysis’.

Su, M., Peyre, H., Song, S., McBride, C., Tardif, T., Li, H., Zhang, Y., Liang, W., Zhang, Z., Ramus, F., Shu, H., 2017, The influence of early linguistic skills and family factors on literacy acquisition in Chinese children: Follow-up from age 3 to age 11. Learning and Instruction, 49, 54–63.

Abstract:
The present longitudinal study investigated the predictive power of preschool linguistic skills and early family factors on children's comprehensive literacy skills at the end of primary school in 262 Chinese children. The results indicated that a substantial (20–34%) share of variance of 5th grade (age 11) literacy skills in Chinese could be explained by early family factors (age 3) and linguistic skills (age 3–age 5). Family socioeconomic status and parent-child reading tuition were associated with different literacy measures. A differential pattern of prediction was also observed among different literacy skills. Furthermore, path analyses indicated that the relationships between early family factors and literacy skills at age 11 were mediated by specific linguistic and cognitive skills at preschool.

CALENDAR

February 2, 2017
SPS-AFIA-DEC Day

Entrée gratuite, réservation obligatoire

February 3, 2017
AECS seminar (IJN) - Justin Smith (Université Paris Diderot): "Free Natural Beauties and the Question of Non-Human Art"

February 3, 2017
Social Cognition Seminar (LNC) - Dr Uri Hertz: "How to influence others and get approval from your granny: The neural computations underlying strategic management of social influence"

February 7, 2017
PaCS seminar (IJN) - François Kammerer (Université Paris-Sorbonne, Paris IV): "Does the explanatory gap really arise from a fallacy?"

February 14, 2017
PaCS seminar (IJN) - Frederic Nef (EHESS, IJN): "Normes et valeurs : primauté et différence"

February 15, 2017
Metaethics seminar (IJN) - Paul Boswell (Université de Montréal/CRÉ): "Well-Being, the Good and Functioning"

February 17, 2017
AECS seminar (IJN) - Roger Pouivet (Archives Henry-Poincaré, Université Lorraine): "From Virtue Epistemology to Virtue Aesthetics"

February 21, 2017
DEC Colloquium - Emeran Mayer (UCLA): "Brain-gut interactions"

February 24, 2017
AECS seminar (IJN) - Tiziana Zalla (CNRS, IJN): "The Self and its emotions in fiction in adults with and without autism"

February 24, 2017
IJN colloquium - Josef Stern (University of Chicago): "Quotations and Pictures"

February 27, 2017
PaCS seminar (IJN) - Andrew Lee (NYU): "The Deep Structure of Experience"

February 28, 2017
Cycle de séminaire "Language acquisition across languages and cultures" (LSCP) - Marisa Casillas (Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics) : "Input and development in two rural cultures"

DEC calendar available on: cognition.ens.fr

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