Claire Chambers, Sahar Akram, Vincent Adam, Claire Pelofi, Maneesh Sahani, Shihab Shamma & Daniel Pressnitzer, 2017. Prior context in audition informs bindingand shapes simple features. Nature

Abstract:
A perceptual phenomenon is reported, whereby prior acoustic context has a large, rapid and long-lasting effect on a basic auditory judgement. Pairs of tones were devised to include ambiguous transitions between frequency components, such that listeners were equally likely to report an upward or downward ‘pitch’ shift between tones. We show that presenting context tones before the ambiguous pair almost fully determines the perceived direction of shift. The context effect generalizes to a wide range of temporal and spectral scales, encompassing the characteristics of most realistic auditory scenes. Magnetoencephalographic recordings show that a relative reduction in neural responsivity is correlated to the behavioural effect. Finally, a computational model reproduces behavioural results, by implementing a simple constraint of continuity for binding successive sounds in a probabilistic manner. Contextual processing, mediated by ubiquitous neural mechanisms such as adaptation, may be crucial to track complex sound sources over time.

"Context and Audition" website

Chambon V.*, Domenech P.*, Jacquet P.O., Barbalat G., Bouton S., Pacherie E., Koechlin E., Farrer C. (2017). Neural coding of prior expectations in hierarchical intention inference. Scientific Reports, 7(1):1278.

Abstract:
The ability to infer other people's intentions is crucial for successful human social interactions. Such inference relies on an adaptive interplay of sensory evidence and prior expectations. Crucially, this interplay would also depend on the type of intention inferred, i.e., on how abstract the intention is. However, what neural mechanisms adjust the interplay of prior and sensory evidence to the abstractness of the intention remains conjecture. We addressed this question in two separate fMRI experiments, which exploited action scenes depicting different types of intentions (Superordinate vs. Basic; Social vs. Non-social), and manipulated both prior and sensory evidence. We found that participants increasingly relied on priors as sensory evidence became scarcer. Activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) reflected this interplay between the two sources of information. Moreover, the more abstract the intention to infer (Superordinate > Basic, Social > Non-Social), the greater the modulation of backward connectivity between the mPFC and the temporo-parietal junction (TPJ), resulting in an increased influence of priors over the intention inference. These results suggest a critical role for the fronto-parietal network in adjusting the relative weight of prior and sensory evidence during hierarchical intention inference.

L. Safraa, Y. Alganb, T. Tecuc, J. Grèzesa, N. Baumard, C. Chevallier (May 6, 2017). Childhood harshness predicts long-lasting leader preferences. Evolution and Human Behavior

Abstract :
Understanding the origins of political authoritarianism is of key importance for modern democracies. Recent works in evolutionary psychology suggest that human cognitive preferences may be the output of a biological response to early stressful environments. In this paper, we hypothesized that people's leader preferences are partly driven by early signals of harshness. We experimentally elicited children's (Study 1) and adults' (Study 2) political preferences using faces controlled for dominance and trustworthiness and showed that early childhood harshness has an enduring effect on adult political attitudes. Importantly, this effect was further confirmed using self-reported extreme authoritarianism (Study 2) and by the analysis of the large database of the European Value Survey (Study 3). We discuss the potential political implications of this early calibration of leader preferences.

Press release INSERM

Stefano Palminteri, Valentin Wyart, Etienne Koechlin (2017). The Importance of Falsification in Computational Cognitive Modeling. ScienceDirect

Abstract:
In the past decade the field of cognitive sciences has seen an exponential growth in the number of computational modeling studies. Previous work has indicated why and how candidate models of cognition should be compared by trading off their ability to predict the observed data as a function of their complexity. However, the importance of falsifying candidate models in light of the observed data has been largely underestimated, leading to important drawbacks and unjustified conclusions. We argue here that the simulation of candidate models is necessary to falsify models and therefore support the specific claims about cognitive function made by the vast majority of model-based studies. We propose practical guidelines for future research that combine model comparison and falsification.

F. Recanati, About the lekton: Response to Kölbel. In I. Depraetere & R. Salkie (eds) Semantics and Pragmatics: Drawing a line, pp. 215-24. Springer 2017.

Abstract:
In earlier work on so-called moderate relativism, I distinguished three semantic levels: (i) the meaning of the sentence, (ii) the lekton (a typically 'relativized' proposition, true at some situations and false at others), and (iii) the Austinian proposition (the lekton together with a topic situation serving as circumstance of evaluation). The lekton can be construed as a property of situations or a type of situation. The Austinian proposition is true iff the topic situation is of the type corresponding to the lekton. In his contribution to this volume, Max Kölbel expresses a few worries about my framework. First, he finds the psychological considerations I offer in support of the intermediate notion (the lekton) insufficient: a properly semantic justification is needed, he argues (and he provides one). Second, he worries about my thesis that the lekton is 'fully articulated', because it conflicts with the contextualist claim (defended by myself in many writings) that 'what is said' is porous and hospitable to unarticulated constituents. Third, he discusses potentially unwelcome implications of my view in connection with faultless disagreement. In this response I consider the three issues raised by Kölbel, along with his suggestions for tackling them. I endorse Kölbel's semantic argument for the lekton while dismissing his objection to the claim of full articulatedness. Regarding faultless disagreement, I attempt to make sense of it from a classical expressivist standpoint.

CALENDAR

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