Nicolas Baumard, Lou Safra, Martins, Mauricio & Coralie Chevallier. (2023). Cognitive fossils: using cultural artifacts to reconstruct psychological changes throughout history. Trends in Cognitive Sciences. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2023.10.001

Résumé :
Psychology is crucial for understanding human history. When aggregated, changes in the psychology of individuals – in the intensity of social trust, parental care, or intellectual curiosity – can lead to important changes in institutions, social norms, and cultures. However, studying the role of psychology in shaping human history has been hindered by the difficulty of documenting the psychological traits of people who are no longer alive. Recent developments in psychology suggest that cultural artifacts reflect in part the psychological traits of the individuals who produced or consumed them. Cultural artifacts can thus serve as 'cognitive fossils' – physical imprints of the psychological traits of long-dead people. We review the range of materials available to cognitive and behavioral scientists, and discuss the methods that can be used to recover and quantify changes in psychological traits throughout history.

Victor Chung, Julie Grèzes & Elisabeth Pacherie (2023). Collective Emotion: A Framework for Experimental Research. Emotion Review, 0(0). doi:10.1177/17540739231214533

Résumé :
Research on collective emotion spans social sciences, psychology and philosophy. There are detailed case studies and diverse theories of collective emotion. However, experimental evidence regarding the universal characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective emotion remains sparse. Moreover, current research mainly relies on emotion self-reports, accounting for the subjective experience of collective emotion and ignoring their cognitive and physiological bases. In response to these challenges, we argue for experimental research on collective emotion. We start with an overview of theoretical frameworks to identify a set of three characteristics of collective emotion. Based on research in cognitive and affective sciences, we then examine the corresponding candidate mechanisms. Finally, we highlight outstanding questions, review experimental evidence, and suggest ideas for future experimental research.

Léo Fitouchi, Jean-Baptiste André & Nicolas Baumard (2023). The puritanical moral contract: Purity, cooperation, and the architecture of the moral mind. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 46, E322. doi:10.1017/S0140525X23001188

Résumé
Commentators raise fundamental questions about the notion of purity (sect. R1), the architecture of moral cognition (sect. R2), the functional relationship between morality and cooperation (sect. R3), the role of folk-theories of self-control in moral judgment (sect. R4), and the cultural variation of morality (sect. R5). In our response, we address all these issues by clarifying our theory of puritanism, responding to counter-arguments, and incorporating welcome corrections and extensions.

Laura Gwilliams, Graham Flick, Alec Marantz, A. et al. (2023). Introducing MEG-MASC a high-quality magneto-encephalography dataset for evaluating natural speech processing. Sci Data. 10, 862. doi:10.1038/s41597-023-02752-5

Résumé :
The “MEG-MASC” dataset provides a curated set of raw magnetoencephalography (MEG) recordings of 27 English speakers who listened to two hours of naturalistic stories. Each participant performed two identical sessions, involving listening to four fictional stories from the Manually Annotated Sub-Corpus (MASC) intermixed with random word lists and comprehension questions. We time-stamp the onset and offset of each word and phoneme in the metadata of the recording, and organize the dataset according to the ‘Brain Imaging Data Structure’ (BIDS). This data collection provides a suitable benchmark to large-scale encoding and decoding analyses of temporally-resolved brain responses to speech. We provide the Python code to replicate several validations analyses of the MEG evoked responses such as the temporal decoding of phonetic features and word frequency. All code and MEG, audio and text data are publicly available to keep with best practices in transparent and reproducible research.

William N Havard, Loann Peurey, Kasia Hitczenko, Alejandrina Cristia. Speech Maturity Dataset. Many Paths to Language (MPaL) 2023, Oct 2023, Nijmegen, Netherlands. . ⟨halshs-04294803⟩

Résumé :
Over the first years of life, children’s spontaneous vocal productions become increasingly adult-like, both in their shape and phonetic properties, and lay the foundation for later phonetic and phonological development. Yet, research in this area has been limited to a narrow set of languages and communities, mainly Indo-European languages from Western(ised) speaker communities, and focused on a narrow age range (0 - 24mo). We present a new publicly-available dataset, the Speech Maturity Dataset (SMD), consisting of 258,914 clips manually labelled for speaker and vocalisation type extracted from the long-form recordings of 398 children (209 male, 186 female) from 2 months to 6 years of age from 14 communities (ranging from rich industrialised societies to farmer-forager speaker communities) in 25+ languages. Albeit already massive, our dataset represents the first version of an ongoing and collaborative effort between field linguists, psycholinguists, and citizen scientists. The data set is expected to be expanded on a regular basis, since the project is still live (https://www.zooniverse.org/projects/laac-lscp/maturity-of-baby-sounds). SMD is a superset of the already existing BabbleCor dataset (Cychosz et al., 2019) which originally consisted of ~15k vocalisations. We followed the same methodology to constitute our dataset, whereby all the clips received a label based on the majority vote of at least 3 citizen scientists (i.e., non-scientific volunteers who devote time to annotate and label scientific data). Contrary to BabbleCor, which used the smaller and closed iHEARu-PLAY platform, we turned to the world's largest open citizen science platform, Zooniverse, as it had a larger and more diverse pool of citizen scientists. Citizen scientists labelled vocalisations taken from naturalistic long-form recordings with their vocalisation type: laughing, crying, canonical (speech-like vocalisation containing an adjacent consonant and vowel), non-canonical (speech-like vocalisation without an adjacent consonant and vowel), or junk (silence or non-human sounds). For a subset of the clips (N=110,577), citizen scientists also labelled the speaker type: baby (younger than 3 years), child (3-12 years), female/male adolescent (12-18 years), or female/male adult. SMD, which includes a wealth of metadata (child’s age/sex, linguistic environment, normativity, etc.), lends itself to several use cases. It can be used to study child vocalisation development at an unprecedented scale in a wide variety of communities, by computing indices of vocal development such as canonical proportion (i.e. the proportion of speech-like vocalizations that contain an adjacent consonant and vowel – regardless of whether they are in babble or meaningful speech) or linguistic proportion (i.e. the proportion of vocalizations that are speech-like). This dataset can also be used to train vocalisation-type classifiers in an effort to make software dedicated to the study of child language acquisition free, open-source, and reproducible. We showcase a potential use of this data set by presenting a preliminary analysis of canonical proportion and linguistic proportion. We fitted two linear mixed effect models to predict canonical proportion and separately, linguistic proportion from the child’s age, sex and monolingualism as fixed effects, and child ID nested in corpus as a random effect to account for individual variation. While for both models we observe a statistically significant positive effect of age (which is natural, as we expect these proportions to increase with age), we do not observe any significant effect of monolingualism or sex, suggesting that children follow a similar development trajectory. Results like these promise to allow researchers to significantly expand their knowledge of early vocal development.

Christian Lorenzi (2023). Human auditory ecology: Extending hearing research to the perception of natural soundscapes by humans. J. Acoust. Soc. Am., 154(A70 ). doi:10.1121/10.0022829

Résumé :
A “natural soundscape” refers to the case where the contribution of acoustic events resulting from human activity can be considered as negligeable. As a consequence, natural soundscapes are only composed of biological sounds and geophysical sounds shaped by the specific way sounds propagate within the habitat under study. Within this framework, studying soundscape perception in humans aims at unveiling the relationship between the features of sound mixtures picked up at a given place and time by the peripheral auditory system of a human listener and the characteristics of the auditory percept evoked by these features. We will present a research program based on large and ecologically-valid acoustic databases recorded in protected areas aiming to (i) better understand the mechanisms involved in auditory perception of natural soundscapes; (ii) characterize and explain the effects of sensorineural hearing loss on perception of natural soundscapes; and (iii) assess the extent to which alterations in soundscape perception can be restored back to normal via hearing aids. This programme combines modelling and psychophysical methods to explore our ability to distinguish between habitat, time of day and season, to detect the presence of biological sound sources and to assess levels of biodiversity in the habitat.

Nicole Miller-Viacava, Diane Lazard, Tanguy Delmas, Bernie Krause, Frédéric Apoux & Christian Lorenzi (2023). Sensorineural hearing loss alters auditory discrimination of natural soundscapes, International Journal of Audiology. doi: 10.1080/14992027.2023.2272559

Résumé :
Objective
The ability to discriminate natural soundscapes recorded in a temperate terrestrial biome was measured in 15 hearing-impaired (HI) listeners with bilateral, mild to severe sensorineural hearing loss and 15 normal-hearing (NH) controls.
Design
Soundscape discrimination was measured using a three-interval oddity paradigm and the method of constant stimuli. On each trial, sequences of 2-second recordings varying the habitat, season and period of the day were presented diotically at a nominal SPL of 60 or 80 dB.
Results
Discrimination scores were above chance level for both groups, but they were poorer for HI than NH listeners. On average, the scores of HI listeners were relatively well accounted for by those of NH listeners tested with stimuli spectrally-shaped to match the frequency-dependent reduction in audibility of individual HI listeners. However, the scores of HI listeners were not significantly correlated with pure-tone audiometric thresholds and age.
Conclusions
These results indicate that the ability to discriminate natural soundscapes associated with changes in habitat, season and period of the day is disrupted but it is not abolished. The deficits of the HI listeners are partly accounted for by reduced audibility. Supra-threshold auditory deficits and individual listening strategies may also explain differences between NH and HI listeners.

Joëlle Proust (2023). Affordances from a control viewpoint, Philosophical Psychology, DOI: 10.1080/09515089.2023.2274489

Résumé :
Perceiving an armchair prepares us to sit. Reading the first line in a text prepares us to read it. This article proposes that the affordance construct used to explain reactive potentiation of behavior similarly applies to reactive potentiation of cognitive actions. It defends furthermore that, in both cases, affordance-sensings do not only apply to selective (dis)engagement, but also to the revision and the termination of actions. In the first section, characteristics of environmental affordance-sensings such as directness, stability, action potentiation, valence, and phenomenology are reexamined in light of contemporary cognitive science. In the second section, it is proposed that cognitive affordance-sensings can also be characterized along these dimensions. Called “metacognitive feelings” in the metacognitive literature, their function is to select, engage, revise and post-evaluate cognitive actions. A third section discusses alternative views, and responds to objections.

Daniil Radushev, Olesia Dogonasheva, Boris Gutkin and Denis Zakharov, "Chimera states in a ring of non-locally connected interneurons," 2023 7th Scientific School Dynamics of Complex Networks and their Applications (DCNA), Kaliningrad, Russian Federation, 2023, pp. 229-232, doi: 10.1109/DCNA59899.2023.10290318.

Chimera states, in which synchronous and asynchronous dynamics are simultaneously observed in a network of identical elements with symmetric connections, are one of the most interesting phenomena in synchronization theory. In our work, we examined the main synchronous states in the ring of Morris-Lecar neurons of the second class of excitability with non-local symmetrical inhibitory connections. Such neurons mimic the activity of interneurons, which are the main type of inhibitory neurons in cortical structures and the hippocampus. The main focus of the study was on chimera states that were detected by the Adaptive Coherence Measure. We assume that these states may possibly be the origin of the interneuronal gamma rhythm in the brain. Also, we developed the ACM approach and showed that for states containing inactive neurons, it is better to use the ACM parameter calculated only for neurons generating spikes.

Eva Wanek, Sacha Bourgeois-Gironde & Alda Mari. (2023). Desire, moral evaluation or sense of duty: The modal framing of stated preference elicitation. Environmental Values, 0(0).

Résumé :
Contingent valuation surveys generally elicit stated preferences by asking how much a respondent would be willing to pay for an environmental improvement. By drawing on linguistic theory, we propose that the modal phrasing of this question establishes a particular type of commitment towards a hypothetical payment, namely a subjective want or desire. Based on the idea that beyond subjective desires, considerations about what is morally adequate may guide expressed values and that elicitation of these can be linguistically facilitated, we employ an experimental framework to investigate the effects of different modals (willing, should and appropriate) in the elicitation question on stated preferences. We find that elicited amounts with appropriate are higher than those elicited with willing and should for environmental improvements more associated with use values, while differences are non-significant for environmental improvements more associated with non-use values. We discuss the implications of our findings for stated preference studies, as well as the potential broader theoretical implications that our study entails regarding linguistic representations of the moral entrenchment of environmental values.

Shuai Yang, Lorraine Poncet, Muriel Tafflet, Sandrine Lioret, Hugo Peyre, Franck Ramus, Barbara Heude & Jonathan Bernard (2023). Association of screen use trajectories from early childhood and cognitive development in late childhood: The EDEN mother–child cohort. Computers in Human Behavior, 108042. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2023.108042

Résumé : Screen use has been related to children's cognitive development, but more evidence from longitudinal studies is needed. We investigated the association of screen use trajectories from age 2 to 11–12 years and cognitive development at 11–12 years in 459 children from the EDEN cohort. Parents reported how frequently TV was on during family meals at age 2, 3, 5 and 8 years and children's screen time at the same ages up to 11–12 years. Intellectual abilities were derived from subtests of the Wechsler Intelligence Scale for Children, and the Peabody Picture Vocabulary Test at 11–12 years. Trajectories of screen time and TV on during family meals were identified and examined in relation with intellectual abilities using multivariable linear regression models. Four screen time trajectories were identified: low (11%), average (50%), high (32%), and very high (6%) user. The three trajectories of TV on during family meals were never (41%), sometimes (34%), and often/always (25%). Screen time trajectories were not associated with intellectual abilities at 11–12 years. TV on sometimes (vs never), but not often/always, during family meals was associated with reduced non-verbal and general intellectual abilities. Future studies need to consider the context of screen use, not just the time.

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