Mélusine Boon-Falleur, Nicolas Baumard & Jean-BBaptiste André (2024). The Effect of Income and Wealth on Behavioral Strategies, Personality Traits, and Preferences. Perspectives on Psychological Science 0(0).doi:10.1177/17456916231201512

Résumé :
Individuals living in either harsh or favorable environments display well-documented psychological and behavioral differences. For example, people in favorable environments tend to be more future-oriented, trust strangers more, and have more explorative preferences. To account for such differences, psychologists have turned to evolutionary biology and behavioral ecology, in particular, the literature on life-history theory and pace-of-life syndrome. However, critics have found that the theoretical foundations of these approaches are fragile and that differences in life expectancy cannot explain vast psychological and behavioral differences. In this article, we build on the theory of optimal resource allocation to propose an alternative framework. We hypothesize that the quantity of resources available, such as income, has downstream consequences on psychological traits, leading to the emergence of behavioral syndromes. We show that more resources lead to more long-term orientation, more tolerance of variance, and more investment in low marginal-benefit needs. At the behavioral level, this translates, among others, into more large-scale cooperation, more investment in health, and more exploration. These individual-level differences in behavior, in turn, account for cultural phenomena such as puritanism, authoritarianism, and innovation.

Yves Boubenec (2024). How speech is produced and perceived in the human cortex. Nature News and Views.doi:10.1038/d41586-024-00078-9

Résumé:
A neural probe has been used to capture the activity of large populations of single neurons as people are speaking or listening, providing detailed insights into how the brain encodes specific features of speech.

Rupesh K Chillale, Shihab Shamma, Srdjan Ostojic, Yves Boubenec (2023). Dynamics and maintenance of categorical responses in primary auditory cortex during task engagement. eLife, 12:e85706, doi:10.7554/eLife.85706

Résumé :
Grouping sets of sounds into relevant categories is an important cognitive ability that enables the association of stimuli with appropriate goal-directed behavioral responses. In perceptual tasks, the primary auditory cortex (A1) assumes a prominent role by concurrently encoding both sound sensory features and task-related variables. Here we sought to explore the role of A1 in the initiation of sound categorization, shedding light on its involvement in this cognitive process. We trained ferrets to discriminate click trains of different rates in a Go/No-Go delayed categorization task and recorded neural activity during both active behavior and passive exposure to the same sounds. Purely categorical response components were extracted and analyzed separately from sensory responses to reveal their contributions to the overall population response throughout the trials. We found that categorical activity emerged during sound presentation in the population average and was present in both active behavioral and passive states. However, upon task engagement, categorical responses to the No-Go category became suppressed in the population code, leading to an asymmetrical representation of the Go stimuli relative to the No-Go sounds and prestimulus baseline. The population code underwent an abrupt change at stimulus offset, with sustained responses after the Go sounds during the delay period. Notably, the categorical responses observed during the stimulus period exhibited a significant correlation with those extracted from the delay epoch, suggesting an early involvement of A1 in stimulus categorization.

Edgar Dubourg, Valentin Thouzeau, Nicolas Baumard (2024). The psychological origins of science fiction. Poetics. Volume 102, 101862

Résumé :
Science fiction has become very popular across all mediatic forms (e.g., in short stories, in novels, in movies, in TV series). The cultural success of this genre is both geographically widespread and rather recent in history. Although such observations seem consensual, many problems remain and are debated in science fiction study, notably (1) the defining characteristics of the genre, (2) the reasons for its late emergence, and (3) the interindividual variability of its appeal. Previous attempts to solve such puzzles focused on proximate How-questions (e.g., How did the genre emerge?). The article presents a contribution from cognitive and evolutionary sciences, which make it possible to ask Why-questions (e.g., Why did the genre emerge?). We hypothesize that science fiction, with its emphasis on new and innovative features (e.g., new civilizations, innovative technologies, futuristic worlds), appeals to the human desire for new abstract information. We review research in neuroscience, evolutionary psychology, and behavioral ecology, showing that some specialized biological mechanisms in human cognition prompt exploratory preferences for such information. We show that this hypothesis can explain (1) why science fiction works are perceived as homogenous and different from works of fiction of other genres, (2) why science fiction emerged and became culturally successful rather late in literary history, and (3) why the preference for science fiction varies across time, across space, and across individuals. We provide empirical testable predictions that should be tested in the future to confirm this hypothesis.

Erva Nihan Kandemir, Jill-Jênn Vie, Franck Ramus, Olivier Palombi, Adam Hegel Sanchez Ayte. Adaptation of the Multi-Concept Multivariate Elo Rating System to Medical Students’ Training Data. LAK 24 - The 14th Learning Analytics and Knowledge Conference, Mar 2024, Kyoto, Japan. 10.1145/3636555.3636858 . hal-04371748

Résumé :
Accurate estimation of question difficulty and prediction of student performance play key roles in optimizing educational instruction and enhancing learning outcomes within digital learning platforms. The Elo rating system is widely recognized for its proficiency in predicting student performance by estimating both question diffi- culty and student ability while providing computational efficiency and real-time adaptivity. This paper presents an adaptation of a multi-concept variant of the Elo rating system to the data collected by a medical training platform—a platform characterized by a vast knowledge corpus, substantial inter-concept overlap, a huge question bank with significant sparsity in user-question interactions, and a highly diverse user population, presenting unique challenges. Our study is driven by two primary objectives: firstly, to com- prehensively evaluate the Elo rating system’s capabilities on this real-life data, and secondly, to tackle the issue of imprecise early- stage estimations when implementing the Elo rating system for online assessments. Our findings suggest that the Elo rating system exhibits comparable accuracy to the well-established logistic regression model in predicting final exam outcomes for users within our digital platform. Furthermore, results underscore that initializing Elo rating estimates with historical data remarkably reduces errors and enhances prediction accuracy, especially during the initial phases of student interactions.

Amine Sijilmassi, Lou Safra, Nicolas Baumard (2024). ‘Our Roots Run Deep’: Historical Myths as Culturally Evolved Technologies for Coalitional Recruitment. Behavioral and Brain Sciences. 1-44.doi:10.1017/S0140525X24000013

Résume :
One of the most remarkable manifestations of social cohesion in large-scale entities is the belief in a shared, distinct and ancestral past. Human communities around the world take pride in their ancestral roots, commemorate their long history of shared experiences, and celebrate the distinctiveness of their historical trajectory. Why do humans put so much effort into celebrating a long-gone past? Integrating insights from evolutionary psychology, social psychology, evolutionary anthropology, political science, cultural history and political economy, we show that the cultural success of historical myths is driven by a specific adaptive challenge for humans: the need to recruit coalitional support to engage in large scale collective action and prevail in conflicts. By showcasing a long history of cooperation and shared experiences, these myths serve as super-stimuli, activating specific features of social cognition and drawing attention to cues of fitness interdependence. In this account, historical myths can spread within a population without requiring group-level selection, as long as individuals have a vested interest in their propagation and strong psychological motivations to create them. Finally, this framework explains, not only the design-features of historical myths, but also important patterns in their cross-cultural prevalence, inter-individual distribution, and particular content.

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