INTERVIEW
Entretien avec Sylvie Maillot étudiante en M1 au Cogmaster
Le Cogmaster est le master de sciences cognitives de l'ENS, en co-habilitation avec Paris-Descartes et l'EHESS. Il a pour but de former par la recherche à l'étude scientifique et interdisciplinaire des grandes fonctions mentales, des étudiants provenant de disciplines diverses.
Pourquoi as-tu choisi de faire le Cogmaster ? Quelles sont tes motivations ?
J'ai découvert le Cogmaster lorsque j'ai préparé ma candidature pour la procédure d'admission sur dossier à l'ENS. Je me suis intéressée assez jeune aux questions du cerveau et de la cognition, alors quand je suis tombée sur la présentation de ce cursus sur internet, je me suis dit que c'était vraiment ce que je voulais faire ! Par la suite, en licence, quand j'ai commencé à prendre des cours au DEC, qui propose le programme du Cogmaster, j'ai appris à apprécier la pluridisciplinarité des cours et l'ouverture que cela apporte à l'étude des différentes problématiques. Quand on prend un cours de psychologie par exemple, suivant les étudiants qui y assistent, on va avoir des questions qui abordent un même sujet du point de vue philosophique, neurologique, comportemental etc., et c'est extrêmement enrichissant !
Comment s'est déroulé le processus de sélection ?
Comme j'étais à l'ENS en licence, ça a été un peu particulier pour moi. Lorsque j'ai postulé sur dossier auprès du département de Biologie pour y faire ma L3, j'avais conjointement demandé l'affiliation au DEC - qui ne propose pas de programme de licence, et où on entre donc qu'en master. Ainsi lors de l'entretien, en plus des représentants du département de biologie, était aussi présent le Directeur des Etudes du DEC. Ainsi je suis entrée à l'Ecole comme étudiante du département de biologie, mais avec une affiliation au DEC prévue pour l'année d'après. Au mois de mai l'année suivante, j'ai tout de même dû effectuer ma candidature auprès du DEC pour entrer au Cogmaster - relevés de notes, lettre de motivation, entretiens etc. Comme je connaissais la maison, c'était probablement moins intimidant que pour d'autres candidats.
Quel a été ton parcours avant le Cogmaster ?
J'ai fait un bac S puis deux ans de prépa BCPST (biologie) au lycée Saint Louis à Paris avant d'entrer à l'ENS sur dossier.
Qu'est ce que le Cogmaster t'apporte ?
Principalement, une formation où les différents domaines interagissent activement, ce qui la rend très riche. En plus, les enseignants étant tous des chercheurs, on a un accès direct sur la recherche telle qu'elle est en train de se faire. Grâce à cela et aux stages proposés, on ne reste pas enfermés dans la théorie qui, si elle est indispensable, reste peu vivante : rien ne vaut la pratique pour apprendre (de ses erreurs, entre autres). J'ajouterai que les professeurs sont très ouverts et globalement très disponibles pour les élèves, en dépit de leurs emplois du temps très chargés ! Je ne sais pas trop comment cela se passe ailleurs, mais on peut se sentir vite perdu dans les choix à faire - choix des stages, entre autres, mais aussi simplement choix de carrière. C'est bien de pouvoir en discuter avec des gens qui en sont aussi passés par là et qui sont vraiment à même de nous conseiller.
Quels conseils donnerais-tu aux étudiants intéressés par le Cogmaster ?
Une jeune fille qui prépare le dossier d'entrée au Cogmaster m'a contactée récemment car elle ne savait pas trop à quoi s'attendre pour la procédure d'admission, notamment au sujet des deux entretiens prévus dans la deuxième phase et de la lettre de motivation à fournir. Elle me disait aussi être assez intimidée par la réputation élitiste de l'ENS. J'étais un peu dans le même cas qu'elle quand je préparais mon dossier en licence. Je dirais que la chose à garder en tête c'est que, en plus des résultats académiques, la composante essentielle est la curiosité. On ne demande pas aux candidats de tout savoir sur la matière qu'ils veulent étudier. On n'attend pas davantage d'eux d'être 100% au point sur ce qui se passe dans la recherche. C'est bien d'avoir l'air d'être un peu au courant de grands sujets d'actualités, mais si on savait déjà tout sur tout en entrant, et bien, cela ne servirait pas à grand chose de faire un master, n'est-ce pas ? De même, ne pas être sûr de la voie dans laquelle on veut s'engager professionnellement n'est pas un handicap. Vous aurez deux ans pour approfondir les sujets qui vous plaisent et en découvrir de nouveaux dont vous ne soupçonniez peut-être même pas l'existence - j'ai découvert la linguistique en licence, et ça a changé ma vie, vraiment ! Après, quant à la réputation élitiste de l'ENS... Beaucoup de gens en ont eu peur un jour ou l'autre, mais, pour faire une citation à haute valeur culturelle : "100% des gagnants ont tenté leur chance." En vérité, nous sommes des gens (presque) comme les autres, vous savez? Tout ça pour dire: soyez curieux, montrez que vous avez envie d'apprendre et... rendez-vous dans les couloirs du DEC dans quelques années ?
Que souhaites-tu faire après le Cogmaster ? Comment vois-tu ton avenir ?
Je m'oriente vers de la recherche en neurolinguistique - étude des processus neurologiques qui sous-tendent le langage. Pour cela, je compte faire une thèse après le Cogmaster, bien que je ne sache pas encore exactement sur quel sujet de recherche - quand je vous disais que ne pas avoir de plan 100% défini en entrant au Cogmaster n'était pas dramatique. Je ne pense pas à une carrière à l'étranger, mais pourquoi pas y faire des stages.
Site internet du Cogmaster
FUNDING
The "Neuromoney / Neurocomputational substrates of the monetary exchange: an interdisciplinary investigation" Project
The "Neuromoney / Neurocomputational substrates of the monetary exchange: an interdisciplinary investigation" project has been selected as part of the CRCNS 2017 call of the French National Agency for Research. The principle investigators in France for the project are Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde (Institut Jean Nicod) and Stefano Palminteri (Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives). The existence of money raises a fundamental question: why and how can intrinsically worthless objects acquire a positive exchange value? The NeuroMoney project will attempt to understand the entirety of the calculations that allowed money to come into existence, as well as to explore their neural underpinnings.
DEV-exp Project
Christian Lorenzi (UMR CNRS LSP, DEC/IEC, École Normale Supérieure) and Thierry van den Abbeele (Hôpital Robert Debré, Paris) have received funding from the world leader in cochlear implants, Advanced Bionics, for their DEV-exp project.
The goal of the project is to create a research platform dedicated to the experimental study of auditory development in children with and without hearing difficulties. The project will thus aim to put into place an experimental platform equipped with the latest psychophysics and electrophysiological materials. It also aims to train scientific, clinical, and technical staff by using interfacing research including methods from psychophysics, electrophysiology, and psycholinguistics.
The DEV-exp project will involve a collaboration between the ENS, University College London, and the Robert Debré hospital.
APPOINTMENT
Exhibition : Science Frugale
Whether it's making do with tight budgets or tackling local problems with few resources, many scientists have been converting to more frugal science. The ESPGG proposes to address this growing trend that has even made its way into the confines of the ESPCI in Paris.
The exhibition Science Frugale attempts to decipher this movement and focuses on the men and women who are part of it.
Roberto Casati (Institut Jean Nicod) is one of the exhibition's curators.
Read more about "Science Frugale"
AUDIO/VIDEO
Semaine du Cerveau - "Language acquisition in babies"
Sharon Peperkamp (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique)’s conference on language acquisition in babies, which she gave during the 2017 edition of Semaine du Cerveau (Brain Week), is now available online on the ENS’s Youtube channel.
Young children learn how to understand and speak their native language with surprising speed and with little apparent effort.
Around the age of three or four, their vocabulary is still relatively small and they still have progress to
make with regards to pronunciation, but they produce correctly structured sentences and their ability to understand
spoken language is already comparable to that of adults. This acquisition is due to a human predisposition and happens
informally and without instruction, simply by immersion in a given linguistic environment. Over the last 30 or so years,
research in cognitive science has documented the different stages of linguistic development starting from birth, and has
studied the mechanisms that allow babies and young children to acquire their native language.
Semaine du Cerveau - "Understanding the origin of variability in human decision making in uncertain situations"
The video recording of Valentin Wyart (Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives)’s talk entitled "Understanding the origin of variability in human decision making in uncertain situations"
is available on the SavoirsENS website, in the "Semaine du Cerveau" section.
Watch the video
Are sign languages more expressive than spoken languages?
The audio recording of the talk given by Phillipe Schlenker (IJN) as part of the Philosophy Mondays program is available on the SavoirsENS website.
Contemporary linguistics has established three results:
• Sign languages, used by deaf communities around the world, are full-fledged languages that share typological characteristics both with each other and with spoken languages.
• Sign languages have the same ‘logical carapace’ as spoken languages, but they also sometimes show the ‘logical form’ of sentences, for example in the case of ‘logical variables’ (the concept of ‘logical visibility’).
• Sign languages additionally have rich iconic possibilities, including in their logical motor: logical variables can thus simultaneously be iconic representations of what they denote (the concept of ‘iconicity’). The possibilities for iconic representation in speech, by contrast, are very limited.
Should we thus conclude that sign languages are more expressive than spoken languages? In order for our understanding to be complete, we must reintegrate co-verbal gestures, which have rich iconic capacities, into the semantics of spoken languages. We will argue, however, that even when comparing speech that has been “enriched by co-verbal gestures” to sign languages, the latter maintain expressive properties that the former do not.
Listen to the talk
IN THE MEDIA
What if optimism were learnable?
How does our brain learn from our mistakes? Does it prefer good or bad news?
These are the questions that have recently been answered by a team of researchers led by Stefano Palminteri (ATIP-Avenir),
from the Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives. The results have just been published in Nature Human Behaviour and show that the brain tends to privilege good news.
Danielle Messager, journalist for France Inter, met with Stefano Palminteri during the show Carnet de santé.
Listen to the interview
Where does optimism come from?
An article about the same study was published on the website Sciences & Avenir on March 24.
SOME RECENT PUBLICATIONS
Emmanuel Chemla, Paul Égré, Benjamin Spector (2017),
Characterizing logical consequence in many-valued logic, J Logic Computation exx001.
Abstract:
Several definitions of logical consequence have been proposed in many-valued logic, which coincide in the two-valued case, but come apart as soon
as three truth values come into play. Those definitions include so-called pure consequence, order-theoretic consequence and mixed consequence.
In this article, we examine whether those definitions together carve out a natural class of consequence relations. We respond positively by
identifying a small set of properties that we see instantiated in those various consequence relations, namely truth-relationality,
value-monotonicity, validity-coherence and a constraint of bivalence-compliance, provably replaceable by a structural requisite of
nontriviality. Our main result is that the class of consequence relations satisfying those properties coincides exactly with the
class of mixed consequence relations and their intersections, including pure consequence relations and order-theoretic consequence.
We provide an enumeration of the set of those relations in finite many-valued logics of two extreme kinds: those in which truth values
are well-ordered and those in which values between 0 and 1 are incomparable.
Germain Lefebvre, Maël Lebreton, Florent Meyniel, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde & Stefano Palminteri (2017),
Behavioural and neural characterization of optimistic reinforcement learning, Nature Human Behaviour 1, Article number: 0067 (2017)
Abstract:
When forming and updating beliefs about future life outcomes, people tend to consider good news and to disregard bad news.
This tendency is assumed to support the optimism bias. Whether this learning bias is specific to ‘high-level’
abstract belief update or a particular expression of a more general ‘low-level’ reinforcement learning process
is unknown. Here we report evidence in favour of the second hypothesis. In a simple instrumental learning task,
participants incorporated better-than-expected outcomes at a higher rate than worse-than-expected ones.
In addition, functional imaging indicated that inter-individual difference in the expression of optimistic
update corresponds to enhanced prediction error signalling in the reward circuitry. Our results constitute
a step towards the understanding of the genesis of optimism bias at the neurocomputational level.
Alexander Martin, & Sharon Peperkamp (2017). Assessing the distinctiveness of phonological features in word recognition: Prelexical and lexical influences. Journal of Phonetics, 62, 1–11.
Abstract:
Phonological features have been shown to differ from one another in their perceptual weight during word recog- nition. Here, we examine two possible sources of these asymmetries: bottom-up acoustic perception (some featural contrasts are acoustically more different than others), and top-down lexical knowledge (some contrasts are used more to distinguish words in the lexicon). We focus on French nouns, in which voicing mispronunciations are perceived as closer to canonical pronunciations than both place and manner mispronunciations, indicating that voicing is less important than place and manner for distinguishing words from one another. We find that this result can be accounted for by coalescing the two sources of bias.
Paraouty, N., & Lorenzi, C. (2017).
Using individual differences to assess modulation-processing mechanisms and age effects. Hearing Research, 344, 38-49.
Abstract:
This study used a correlational approach to clarify the mechanisms involved in modulation coding.
Amplitude-modulation (AM) and frequency-modulation (FM) detection thresholds (AMDTs and FMDTs,
respectively) were assessed for 70 normal-hearing listeners. In order to increase between-listeners
variability in peripheral coding, participants with a wide range of age (20–70 years) were included.
AMDTs and FMDTs were measured at a 5-Hz rate, using a 500-Hz sinusoidal carrier. FMDTs were also
measured in the presence of an interfering AM to discourage the use of temporal-envelope cues. The
results showed that AMDTs were significantly correlated with FMDTs, but not with FMDTs measured with
interfering AM. FMDTs with and without interfering AM were significantly correlated with each other.
This pattern of correlation proved to be robust, providing additional evidence that for low carrier
frequencies, (i) low-rate AM and FM detection is based on a common code using temporal-envelope cues
and (ii) low-rate FM detection is based on an additional code using cues distinct from temporal-envelope.
The analyses also showed that age was correlated with FMDTs only. However, no significant difference was
found when comparing the various correlations with age. Hence, the effects of age on modulation sensitivity
remain unclear.
Wallaert, N., Moore, B.C.J., Ewert, S., & Lorenzi, C. (2017). Sensorineural hearing loss enhances auditory sensitivity and temporal integration for amplitude modulation. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 141, doi: 10.1121/1.4976080.
Abstract:
Amplitude-modulation detection thresholds (AMDTs) were measured at 40 dB sensation level for listeners
with mild-to-moderate sensorineural hearing loss (age: 50-64 yr) for a carrier frequency of 500 Hz and
rates of 2 and 20 Hz. The number of modulation cycles, N, varied between two and nine. The data were
compared with AMDTs measured for young and older normal-hearing listeners [Wallaert, Moore, and Lorenzi
(2016). J. Acoust. Soc. Am. 139, 3088-3096]. As for normal-hearing listeners, AMDTs were lower for
the 2-Hz than for the 20-Hz rate, and AMDTs decreased with increasing N. AMDTs were lower for hearing-impaired
listeners than for normal-hearing listeners, and the effect of increasing N was greater for hearing-impaired
listeners. A computational model based on the modulation-filterbank concept and a template-matching decision
strategy was developed to account for the data. The psychophysical and simulation data suggest that the loss
of amplitude compression in the impaired cochlea is mainly responsible for the enhanced sensitivity and temporal
integration of temporal envelope cues found for hearing-impaired listeners. The data also suggest that, for
AM detection, cochlear damage is associated with increased internal noise, but preserved short-term memory and
decision mechanisms.
CALENDAR
April 10, 2017
PaCS seminar (IJN)
Emile Thalabard (Université Paris-Sorbonne) :
"In defence of generic phenomenology"
April 18, 2017
Seminar "La conscience de soi dans tous ses états : corps, action, et perception"
April 18, 2017
AECS seminar (IJN)
Manuel García-Carpintero (Barcelona, LOGOS):
""The Fiction/Non-Fiction Distinction in Films""
April 19-20, 2017
Workshop (IJN)
"Contextual indefiniteness: a problem for semantic theory?"
April 21, 2017
IJN Colloquium
Joshua Armstrong (UCLA):
"The Evolution of Non-Natural Meaning"
April 21, 26, 27, 28, 2017
Conferences (IJN)
Manuel Garcia-Carpintero (Universitat de Barcelona, ENS)
April 24, 2017
Conference (IJN)
Les barrières électorales - le design institutionnel et les techniques de vote
April 25, 2017
Seminar - "La conscience de soi dans tous ses états : corps, action, et perception"
April 25, 2017
DEC Colloquium
Thomas Preat: "Memory dynamics and energy metabolism in drosophila"
April 25, 2017
AECS seminar (IJN)
Raphaël Julliard (EHESS, LAS):
"Nagel's Objective Phenomenology and Vischer's "Einfühlung": Towards a study of subjectivity through artworks"
April 25, 2017
Doc'In Nicod seminar (IJN)
Enrico Grosso (University of Turin, IJN):
"Nagel's Objective Phenomenology and Vischer's "Einfühlung": Towards a study of subjectivity through artworks"
April 26, 2017
Naturalizing Epistemic Norms seminar (IJN)
Pablo Andres López Silva (U. de Valparaiso, Chili):
Titre à venir
April 28, 2017
IJN Colloquium
Kasia Kijana-Placek (Université de Cracovie):
"A polysemous account of proper names"
May 4, 2017
Seminar
"New trends in decision-making: theory and evidence"
DEC calendar available on: cognition.ens.fr
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