Paul Égré (2019), Qu’est-ce que le vague?, Vrin - Chemins Philosophiques.

Résumé :
La plupart des termes du langage ordinaire sont vagues, au sens où les règles de leur usage ne permettent pas de leur assigner une limite d’application claire et déterminée. À partir de quelle taille peut-on dire d’un individu qu’il est grand? Quelle quantité d’une grandeur suffit à dire « beaucoup »? Il ne semble pas exister de réponse bien définie à ces questions. La frontière semble inévitablement floue et variable selon le contexte et le locuteur. Le vague a été mis en évidence dès l’Antiquité avec le paradoxe du tas de blé, ou sorite, qui demande combien de grains de blé sont requis pour faire un tas. Loin d’être un simple cas d’école, le vague est un problème courant qui affecte la signification des catégories juridiques (à quel moment un fœtus devient-il une personne?) mais aussi scientifiques (quelles propriétés font d’un corps céleste une planète?).
L’objet de ce livre est d’expliquer la nature et l’origine du vague dans le langage. Il vise notamment à élucider la question de savoir si le vague est une forme d’ignorance de faits déterminés, ou s’il s’agit d’un phénomène distinct, inhérent à la constitution du sens linguistique.

Paul Egré, Benjamin Icard (2019), Lying and vagueness. In Jörg Meibauer(Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Lying, Oxford University Press

Résumé :
This handbook brings together past and current research on all aspects of lying and deception, with chapters contributed by leading international experts in the field. We are confronted daily with cases of lying, deception, bullshitting, and 'fake news', making it imperative to understand how lying works, how it can be defined, and whether it can be detected. A further important issue is whether lying should always be considered a bad thing or if, in some cases, it is simply a useful instrument of human cognition. This volume is the first to offer a comprehensive and up-to-date exploration of these and other issues from the combined perspectives of linguistics, philosophy, and psychology. Chapters offer precise definitions of lying and its subtypes, and outline the range of fields in which lying and deception play a role, from empirical lie detection and the acquisition of lying to its role in fiction, metaphor, and humour. They also describe the tools and approaches that are used by scholars researching lying and deception, such as questionnaire studies, EEG, neuroimaging, and the polygraph.

The volume will be an essential reference for students and researchers in a range of fields who are looking to deepen their understanding of all aspects of lying and deception, and will contribute to establishing the vibrant new field of interdisciplinary lying research.

Pierre O. Jacquet, Lou Safra, Valentin Wyart, Nicolas Baumard and Coralie Chevallier (2019) The ecological roots of human susceptibility to social influence: a pre-registered study investigating the impact of early-life adversity. 6. Royal Society Open Science

Résumé :
There is considerable variability in the degree to which individuals rely on their peers to make decisions. Although theoretical models predict that environmental risks shift the cost–benefit trade-off associated with social information use, this idea has received little empirical support. Here we aim to test the effect of childhood environmental adversity on humans' susceptibility to follow others’ opinion in the context of a standard face evaluation task. Results collected in a pilot study involving 121 adult participants tested online showed that susceptibility to social influence and childhood environmental adversity are positively associated. Computational analyses further confirmed that this effect is not explained by the fact that participants exposed to early adversity produce noisier decisions overall but that they are indeed more likely to follow the group's opinion. To test the robustness of these findings, a pre-registered direct replication using an optimal sample size was run. The results obtained from 262 participants in the pre-registered study did not reveal a significant association between childhood adversity and task performance but the meta-analysis ran on both the pilot and the pre-registered study replicated the initial finding. This work provides experimental evidence for an association between individuals' past ecology and their susceptibility to social influence.

Guillaume Legendre, Thomas Andrillon, Matthieu Koroma and Sid Kouider (2019), Sleepers track informative speech in a multitalker environment, Nature Human Behaviour, 2397-3374. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0502-5

Résumé :
Sleep is a vital need, forcing us to spend a large portion of our life unable to interact with the external world. Current models interpret such extreme vulnerability as the price to pay for optimal learning. Sleep would limit external interferences on memory consolidation and allow neural systems to reset through synaptic downscaling. Yet, the sleeping brain continues generating neural responses to external events, revealing the preservation of cognitive processes ranging from the recognition of familiar stimuli to the formation of new memory representations. Why would sleepers continue processing external events and yet remain unresponsive? Here we hypothesized that sleepers enter a ‘standby mode’ in which they continue tracking relevant signals, finely balancing the need to stay inward for memory consolidation with the ability to rapidly awake when necessary. Using electroencephalography to reconstruct competing streams in a multitalker environment, we demonstrate that the sleeping brain amplifies meaningful speech compared to irrelevant signals. However, the amplification of relevant stimuli was transient and vanished during deep sleep. The effect of sleep depth could be traced back to specific oscillations, with K complexes promoting relevant information in light sleep, whereas slow waves actively suppress relevant signals in deep sleep. Thus, the selection of relevant stimuli continues to operate during sleep but is strongly modulated by specific brain rhythms.

Communiqué de presse CNRS

De Petrillo, F., Caroli, M., Gori, E., Micucci, A., Gastaldi, S., Bourgeois- Gironde, S., & Addessi, E. (2019), Evolutionary origins of money categorization and exchange: an experimental investigation in tufted capuchin monkeys (Sapajus spp.). Animal Cognition, 1- 18.

Résumé :
Money is a cultural artefact with a central role in human society. Here, we investigated whether some features of money may be traced back to the exchange habits of nonhuman animals, capitalizing on their ability to flexibly use tokens in dif-ferent domains. In Experiment 1, we evaluated whether capuchins can recognize token validity. Six subjects were required to exchange with the experimenter valid/familiar tokens, valid/unfamiliar tokens, invalid tokens, and no-value items. They first exchanged a similar number of valid/familiar and valid/unfamiliar tokens, followed by exchanges of invalid tokens and no-value items. Thus, as humans, capuchins readily recognized token validity, regardless of familiarity. In Experiment 2, we further evaluated the flexibility of the token–food association by assessing whether capuchins could engage in reverse food–token exchanges. Subjects spontaneously performed chains of exchanges, in which a food item was exchanged for a token, and then the token was exchanged for another food. However, performance was better as the advantage gained from the exchange increased. Overall, capuchins recognized token validity and successfully engaged in chains of reverse and direct exchanges. This suggests that—although nonhuman animals are far from having fully-fledged monetary systems—for capuchins tokens share at least some features with human money.

Communiqué de presse IAST

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