Cabrera, Bertoncini, Lorenzi. Perception of speech modulation cues by 6-month-old infants. JSLHR, Published online September 10, 2013.

Abstract
PURPOSE:
This study assessed the capacity of 6-month-old infants to discriminate a voicing contrast (/aba/-/apa/) on the basis of amplitude modulation cues (AM, the variations in amplitude over time within each frequency band) and frequency modulation cues (FM, the oscillations in instantaneous frequency close to the center frequency of the band).
METHOD:
Several vocoded speech conditions were designed to: (i) degrade FM cues in 4 or 32 bands, or (ii) degrade AM in 32 bands. Infants were familiarized to the vocoded stimuli for a period of either 1 or 2 min. Vocoded speech discrimination was assessed using the head-turn preference procedure.
RESULTS:
Infants discriminated /aba/ from /apa/ in each condition. However, familiarization time was found to influence strongly infants' responses (i.e., their preference for novel versus familiar stimuli).
CONCLUSIONS:
Six-month-old infants do not require FM cues, and can use the slowest (<16 Hz) AM cues to discriminate voicing. Moreover, six-month-old infants can use AM cues extracted from only four broad frequency bands to discriminate voicing.

Roberto Casati. Contre le colonialisme numérique. Manifeste pour continuer à lire. Albin Michel, 2013.

Résumé:
Le livre papier est-il mort ? Non. Si le livre papier risque de devenir commercialement obsolète, cela ne signifie pas qu’il soit obsolète cognitivement. N’en déplaise aux colonialistes numériques, les nouveaux formats n’ont pas ouvert de nouveaux horizons de lecture ; au contraire, cette lecture a été volée. Dans cet essai percutant, Roberto Casati montre comment choisir utilement entre des parcours qui capturent l’attention et d’autres qui la protègent. C’est pourquoi l’introduction du numérique à l’école doit se faire prudemment et toujours être soumise à des évaluations rigoureuses. L’école et les enseignants qui en sont la sève n’ont aucune raison de se laisser intimider par la normativité automatique qu’imposent les technologies nouvelles: le « maître électronique » est un mythe. L’école, au contraire, est un espace protégé dans lequel le zapping est exclu. Accéder à l’information, ce n’est pas lire ; lire, ce n’est pas encore comprendre; et comprendre, n’est pas encore apprendre. Il nous faut inventer les moyens de résister à la culture de l’impatience.

Goodman DFM, Benichoux V, Brette R. Decoding neural responses to temporal cues for sound localization.eLife2:e01312, 2013

Abstract:
The activity of sensory neural populations carries information about the environment. This may be extracted from neural activity using different strategies. In the auditory brainstem, a recent theory proposes that sound location in the horizontal plane is decoded from the relative summed activity of two populations in each hemisphere, whereas earlier theories hypothesized that the location was decoded from the identity of the most active cells. We tested the performance of various decoders of neural responses in increasingly complex acoustical situations, including spectrum variations, noise, and sound diffraction. We demonstrate that there is insufficient information in the pooled activity of each hemisphere to estimate sound direction in a reliable way consistent with behavior, whereas robust estimates can be obtained from neural activity by taking into account the heterogeneous tuning of cells. These estimates can still be obtained when only contralateral neural responses are used, consistently with unilateral lesion studies.
En savoir plus sur le site www.eurekalert.org.

Uriah Kriegel. Current Controversies in Philosophy of Mind. Series: Current Controversies in Philosophy.Routledge, 2013

Abstract:
Philosophy of mind is one of the most dynamic fields in philosophy, and one that invites debate around several key questions. There currently exist annotated tomes of primary sources, and a handful of single-authored introductions to the field, but there is no book that captures philosophy of mind’s recent dynamic exchanges for a student audience. By bringing compiling ten newly commissioned pieces in which leading philosophers square off on five central, related debates currently engaging the field, editor Uriah Kriegel has provided such a publication.The five debates include:
- Mind and Body: The Prospects for Russellian Monism
- Mind in Body: The Scope and Nature of Embodied Cognition
- Consciousness: Representationalism and the Phenomenology of Moods
- Mental Representation: The Project of Naturalization
- The Nature of Mind: The Importance of Consciousness.
Preliminary descriptions of each chapter, annotated bibliographies for each controversy, and a supplemental guide to further controversies in philosophy of mind (with bibliographies) help provide clearer and richer views of active controversies for all readers.

Joelle Proust (2013). The Philosophy of Metacognition - Mental Agency and Self-Awareness The Journal of Neuroscience, 33(27), 11296-11301.

Abstract:
Does metacognition, i.e. the capacity to form epistemic self-evaluations about one's current cognitive performance, derive from a mindreading capacity, or does it rely, at least in part, on sui generis informational processes? In The Philosophy of Metacognition Joëlle Proust provides a powerful defense of the second position. Drawing on discussions of empirical evidence from comparative, developmental, and experimental psychology, as well as from neuroscience, and on conceptual analyses, she purports to show that, in contrast with analytic metacognition, procedural metacognition does not need to involve metarepresentations. Procedural metacognition seems to be available to some non-humans (some primates and rodents). Proust further claims that metacognition is essentially related to mental agency, i.e. cognitive control and monitoring. 'Self-probing' is equivalent to a self-addressed question about the feasibility of a mental action ('Am I able to remember this word?'). 'Post-evaluating' is a way of asking oneself whether a given mental action has been successfully completed ('Is this word the one I was looking for?'). Neither question need be articulated conceptually for a feeling of knowing or of being right to be generated, or to drive epistemic control. Various issues raised by the contrast of a procedural, experience-based metacognition, with an analytic, concept-based metacognition are explored, such as whether each is expressed in a different representational format, their sensitivity to different epistemic norms, and the existence of a variety of types of epistemic acceptance.

Ramus, F. (2013). What's the point of neuropsychoanalysis? British Journal of Psychiatry, 203, 170-171

Summary:
Neuropsychoanalysis is a new school of thought attempting to bridge neuroscience and psychoanalysis. Yet few neuroscientists and psychiatrists would have heard of it if it had not recently received public support from notable neuroscientists. The present paper discusses whether such support is warranted.

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