Ritxar Arlegi, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde, Mikel Hualde (2022). Attitudes toward choice with incomplete preferences: An experimental study. Journal of Economic Behavior & Organization, 204, 663-679. doi:10.1016/j.jebo.2022.09.027

Résumé :
We present an experiment to test different individual attitudes toward choice, such as preference for flexibility, choice aversion, betweenness and choice neutrality. Unlike other related experimental papers, we want to analyze whether different choice attitudes can coexist for the same subject, depending on the characteristics of the choice set she is facing. In particular, our main hypothesis is that the presence of incomparability among the alternatives in the choice set, and the time at which such incomparability is solved, affect crucially the kind of attitude towards choice that the subject will exhibit. We find that, indeed, choice attitudes are not homogeneous across choice sets, yet they are conditional on the preferences over the alternatives. We also find some evidence supporting that subjects tend to value heuristically sets as a whole.

Sara Carta, Anthony M.A. Mangiacotti, Alejandro Lopez Valdes, Richard B. Reilly, Fabia Franco, Giovanni M. Di Liberto (2022). The Impact of Temporal Synchronisation Imprecision on TRF Analyses. Journal of Neuroscience Methods, 109765, ISSN 0165-0270, doi:10.1016/j.jneumeth.2022.109765.

Isabelle Dautriche, Brian Buccola, Mélissa Berthet, Joel fagot & Emmanuel chemla (2022). Evidence for compositionality in baboons (Papio papio) through the test case of negation. Sci Rep 12, 19181 (2022).doi:10.1038/s41598-022-21143-1

Résumé:
Can non-human animals combine abstract representations much like humans do with language? In particular, can they entertain a compositional representation such as ‘not blue’? Across two experiments, we demonstrate that baboons (Papio papio) show a capacity for compositionality. Experiment 1 showed that baboons can entertain negative, compositional, representations: they can learn to associate a cue with iconically related referents (e.g., a blue patch referring to all blue objects), but also to the complement set associated with it (e.g., a blue patch referring to all non-blue objects). Strikingly, Experiment 2 showed that baboons not only learn to associate a cue with iconically related referents, but can learn to associate complex cues (composed of the same cue and an additional visual element) with the complement object set. Thus, they can learn an operation, instantiated by this additional visual element, that can be compositionally combined with previously learned cues. These results significantly reduce any claim that would make the manipulation and combination of abstract representations a solely human privilege.

Edgard Dubourg, Nicolas Baumard (2022). Imaginary worlds through the evolutionary lens: Ultimate functions, proximate mechanisms, cultural distribution. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 45, E309. doi:10.1017/S0140525X22000048

Résumé :
We received several commentaries both challenging and supporting our hypothesis. We thank the commentators for their thoughtful contributions, bringing together alternative hypotheses, complementary explanations, and appropriate corrections to our model. Here, we explain further our hypothesis, using more explicitly the framework of evolutionary social sciences. We first explain what we believe is the ultimate function of fiction in general (i.e., entertainment) and how this hypothesis differs from other evolutionary hypotheses put forward by several commentators. We then turn to the proximate features that make imaginary worlds entertaining and, therefore, culturally successful. We finally explore how these insights may explain the distribution of imaginary worlds across time, space, age, and social classes.

William Havard, Camila Scaff, Loann Peurey, Alejandrina Cristia. A study of the production and perception of ' in Tsimane'. Journées Jointes des Groupements de Recherche \emph (LIFT) et \\ \emph (TAL), 2022, Marseille, France. pp.1-8.

Résumé :
A study of the production and perception of 〈’〉 in Tsimane’. Tsimane’ is a language spoken in Bolivia by several thousand people and yet the phonology of Tsimane’ has not been described in detail. With this project, we want to take a step towards better description by focusing on an aspect of language that we find particularly unusual : the sound represented in spelling with 〈’〉, usually analyzed as a glottal stop /P/. We hypothesized that 〈’〉 is a glottal flap. We recorded two adult speakers of Tsimane’ producing (near-)minimal pairs involving this sound. In this paper, we present analyses focused on a syllable extracted from six minimal pairs : /ki-kiP/. Analyses of the spectrograms suggested one speaker consistently used vowel glottalization and to a lesser extent closure, whereas these were ambiguous in our other informant. However, presentation of the key syllables to these two informants and two other adult Tsimane’ listeners revealed clear evidence that they could clearly recover the intended syllable. Together, these data suffice to rule out our initial hypothesis of a glottal flap, since a closure was never obvious in one of the speakers, and suggests instead a more complex set of acoustic cues may be at listeners’ disposal.

Samuel Recht, Pascal Mamassian & Vincent de Gardelle (2022). Metacognition tracks sensitivity following involuntary shifts of visual attention. Psychon Bull Rev. doi:10.3758/s13423-022-02212-y

Résumé :
Salient, exogenous cues have been shown to induce a temporary boost of perceptual sensitivity in their immediate vicinity. In two experiments involving uninformative exogenous cues presented at various times before a target stimulus, we investigated whether human observers (N = 100) were able to monitor the involuntary increase in performance induced by such transients. We found that an increase of perceptual sensitivity (in a choice task) and encoding precision (in a free-estimation task) occurred approximately 100 ms after cue onset, and was accompanied by an increase in confidence about the perceptual response. These simultaneous changes in sensitivity and confidence resulted in stable metacognition across conditions. These results suggest that metacognition efficiently tracks the effects of a reflexive attentional mechanism known to evade voluntary control, and illustrate a striking ability of high-level cognition to capture fleeting, low-level sensory modulations.

Samira Souffi, Léo Varnet, Meryem Zaidi, Brice Bathellier, Chloé Huetz, Jean-Marc Edeline (2022). Reduction in sound discrimination in noise is related to envelope similarity and not to a decrease in envelope tracking abilities. The Journal of Physiology. Doi : 10.1113/JP283526

Résumé ;
Humans and animals constantly face challenging acoustic environments such as various background noises that impair the detection, discrimination and identification of behaviorally relevant sounds. Here, we disentangled the role of temporal envelope tracking on the reduction in neuronal and behavioral discrimination between communication sounds in situations of acoustic degradations. By collecting neuronal activity from six different levels of the auditory system, from auditory nerve up to secondary auditory cortex in anesthetized guinea-pigs, we found that tracking of slow changes of the temporal envelope is a general functional property of auditory neurons for encoding communication sounds in quiet and also in adverse, challenging, conditions. Results from a Go/No-Go sound discrimination task on mice support the idea that the loss of distinct slow envelope cues in noisy conditions impacted the discrimination performance. Together, these results suggest that envelope tracking is potentially a universal mechanism operating in the central auditory system, which allows the detection of any between-stimuli difference in slow envelope and thus cope with degraded conditions.

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