Mireille Babineau, Monica Barbir, Alex de Carvalho et al. (2024). Syntactic bootstrapping as a mechanism for language learning. Nat Rev Psychol.doi:10.1038/s44159-024-00317-w

Résumé :
Several mechanisms have been proposed to explain how young children solve the puzzle of mapping spoken words to their meanings. The influential syntactic bootstrapping theory postulates that children learn the meanings of words (particularly verbs) by paying attention to the syntactic structures in which they occur. In this Review, we first look at the scholarly climate and pivotal experimental findings that gave rise to syntactic bootstrapping theory, how the postulated word-learning mechanism has been investigated, and the role for this mechanism in current and future research. We discuss the prerequisites behind such a powerful learning and inference process and connect it to contemporary learning frameworks that examine how humans build and update their knowledge about the world. Syntactic bootstrapping theory has shaped the landscape of language-acquisition research, and this research has reshaped syntactic bootstrapping in turn — leading to ground-breaking insights into how children assign meanings to words and learn the complex network of language.

Pierre Bourdillon, Liankun Ren, Mila Halgren, et al. (2024). Differential cortical layer engagement during seizure initiation and spread in humans. Nat Commun 15, 5153. doi:10.1038/s41467-024-48746-8

Résumé :
Despite decades of research, we still do not understand how spontaneous human seizures start and spread – especially at the level of neuronal microcircuits. In this study, we used laminar arrays of micro-electrodes to simultaneously record the local field potentials and multi-unit neural activities across the six layers of the neocortex during focal seizures in humans. We found that, within the ictal onset zone, the discharges generated during a seizure consisted of current sinks and sources only within the infra-granular and granular layers. Outside of the seizure onset zone, ictal discharges reflected current flow in the supra-granular layers. Interestingly, these patterns of current flow evolved during the course of the seizure – especially outside the seizure onset zone where superficial sinks and sources extended into the deeper layers. Based on these observations, a framework describing cortical-cortical dynamics of seizures is proposed with implications for seizure localization, surgical targeting, and neuromodulation techniques to block the generation and propagation of seizures.

Roberto Casati (2024). The Cognitive Life of Maps, The MIT Press doi:10.7551/mitpress/14561.001.0001

Résumé :
The “mapness of maps”—how maps live in interaction with their users, and what this tells us about what they are and how they work.
In a sense, maps are temporarily alive for those who design, draw, and use them. They have, for the moment, a cognitive life. To grapple with what this means—to ask how maps can be alive, and what kind of life they have—is to explore the core question of what maps are. And this is what Roberto Casati does in The Cognitive Life of Maps, in the process assembling the conceptual tools for understanding why maps have the power they have, why they are so widely used, and how we use (and misuse) them.
Drawing on insights from cognitive science and philosophy of mind, Casati considers the main claims around what maps are and how they work—their specific syntax, peculiar semantics, and pragmatics. He proposes a series of steps that can lead to a precise theory of maps, one that reveals what maps have in common with diagrams, pictures, and texts, and what makes them different. This minimal theory of maps helps us to see maps nested in many cognitive artifacts—clock faces, musical notation, writing, calendars, and numerical series, for instance. It also allows us to tackle the issue of the territorialization of maps—to show how maps can be used to draw specific spatial inferences about territories. From the mechanics of maps used for navigation to the differences and similarities between maps and pictures and models, Casati's ambitious work is a cognitive map in its own right, charting the way to a new understanding of what maps mean.

Camille Coye, Dunja Veselinović, Agnès Candiotti, Philippe Schlenker, Alban Lemasson, Emmanuel Chemla (2024). Female Diana Monkeys (Cercopithecus diana) Have Complex Calls. Linguistic Inquiry, 1–10.doi:10.1162/ling_a_00535

Paul Égré (2024). Eubulide et la conséquence logique. Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 122, 243-265.

Résumé :
Eubulide de Milet est connu comme l’auteur d’un ensemble considérable d’arguments logiques déconcertants, encore appelés sophismes ou paradoxes. Parmi ceux-ci figurent l’antinomie du Menteur et le paradoxe du Sorite. Peut-on donner une solution unifiée de ces paradoxes ? La réponse examinée dans cet essai est positive et vise à faire connaître la théorie stricte-tolérante, développée à l’origine pour résoudre le Sorite avant d’être transposée au Menteur. Selon cette théorie, la conclusion d’un argument suit logiquement des prémisses quand la vérité stricte des prémisses implique la vérité tolérante de la conclusion. Si les notions de vérité stricte et tolérante coïncident dans un cadre bivalent, elles se recouvrent seulement partiellement dans un cadre trivalent. Nous expliquons en quel sens la théorie stricte-tolérante confère aux notions mêmes de vérité et de conséquence logique un caractère d’équivocité. Or l’identification d’une équivocité préside à la solution d’autres paradoxes, comme dans l’argument du Cornu également dû à Eubulide.

Marwa El Zein, Rocco Mennella, Matteo Sequestro, Emilie Meaux, Valentin Wyart, Julie Grèzes (2024). Prioritized neural processing of social threats during perceptual decision-making. iScience,109951,ISSN 2589-0042.doi:10.1016/j.isci.2024.109951.

Résumé:
Emotional signals, notably those signaling threat, benefit from prioritized processing in the human brain. Yet, it remains unclear whether perceptual decisions about the emotional, threat-related aspects of stimuli involve specific or similar neural computations compared to decisions about their non-threatening/non-emotional components. We developed a novel behavioral paradigm in which participants performed two different detection tasks (emotion vs. color) on the same, two-dimensional visual stimuli. Electroencephalographic (EEG) activity in a cluster of central electrodes reflected the amount of perceptual evidence around 100ms following stimulus onset, when the decision concerned emotion, not color. Second, participants’ choice could be predicted earlier for emotion (240ms) than for color (380ms) by the mu (10Hz) rhythm, which reflects motor preparation. Taken together, these findings indicate that perceptual decisions about threat-signaling dimensions of facial displays are associated with prioritized neural coding in action-related brain regions, supporting the motivational value of socially relevant signals.

Lorna Le Stanc, Marine Lunven,Maria Giavazzi, Agnés Sliwinski, Katia Youssov, Anne-Catherine Bachoud-Lévi & Charlotte Jacquemot (2024). Cognitive reserve involves decision making and is associated with left parietal and hippocampal hypertrophy in neurodegeneration. Communications Biology, 7:741, doi:10.1038/s42003-024-06416-x

Résumé :
Cognitive reserve is the ability to actively cope with brain deterioration and delay cognitive decline in neurodegenerative diseases. It operates by optimizing performance through differential recruitment of brain networks or alternative cognitive strategies. We investigated cognitive reserve using Huntington’s disease (HD) as a genetic model of neurodegeneration to compare premanifest HD, manifest HD, and controls. Contrary to manifest HD, premanifest HD behave as controls despite neurodegeneration. By decomposing the cognitive processes underlying decision making, drift diffusion models revealed a response profile that differs progressively from controls to premanifest and manifest HD. Here, we show that cognitive reserve in premanifest HD is supported by an increased rate of evidence accumulation compensating for the abnormal increase in the amount of evidence needed to make a decision. This higher rate is associated with left superior parietal and hippocampal hypertrophy, and exhibits a bell shape over the course of disease progression, characteristic of compensation.

Arthur Pellegrino, Heike Stein & Alex Cayco-Gajic (2024). Dimensionality reduction beyond neural subspaces with slice tensor component analysis. Nat Neurosci. 27, 1199–1210. doi:10.1038/s41593-024-01626-2

Résumé :
Recent work has argued that large-scale neural recordings are often well described by patterns of coactivation across neurons. Yet the view that neural variability is constrained to a fixed, low-dimensional subspace may overlook higher-dimensional structure, including stereotyped neural sequences or slowly evolving latent spaces. Here we argue that task-relevant variability in neural data can also cofluctuate over trials or time, defining distinct ‘covariability classes’ that may co-occur within the same dataset. To demix these covariability classes, we develop sliceTCA (slice tensor component analysis), a new unsupervised dimensionality reduction method for neural data tensors. In three example datasets, including motor cortical activity during a classic reaching task in primates and recent multiregion recordings in mice, we show that sliceTCA can capture more task-relevant structure in neural data using fewer components than traditional methods. Overall, our theoretical framework extends the classic view of low-dimensional population activity by incorporating additional classes of latent variables capturing higher-dimensional structure.

Rohaut, B., Calligaris, C., Hermann, B. et al. (2024). Multimodal assessment improves neuroprognosis performance in clinically unresponsive critical-care patients with brain injury. Nat Med.doi:10.1038/s41591-024-03019-1

Résumé : Accurately predicting functional outcomes for unresponsive patients with acute brain injury is a medical, scientific and ethical challenge. This prospective study assesses how a multimodal approach combining various numbers of behavioral, neuroimaging and electrophysiological markers affects the performance of outcome predictions. We analyzed data from 349 patients admitted to a tertiary neurointensive care unit between 2009 and 2021, categorizing prognoses as good, uncertain or poor, and compared these predictions with observed outcomes using the Glasgow Outcome Scale–Extended (GOS-E, levels ranging from 1 to 8, with higher levels indicating better outcomes). After excluding cases with life-sustaining therapy withdrawal to mitigate the self-fulfilling prophecy bias, our findings reveal that a good prognosis, compared with a poor or uncertain one, is associated with better one-year functional outcomes (common odds ratio (95% CI) for higher GOS-E: OR = 14.57 (5.70–40.32), P < 0.001; and 2.9 (1.56–5.45), P < 0.001, respectively). Moreover, increasing the number of assessment modalities decreased uncertainty (OR = 0.35 (0.21–0.59), P < 0.001) and improved prognostic accuracy (OR = 2.72 (1.18–6.47), P = 0.011). Our results underscore the value of multimodal assessment in refining neuroprognostic precision, thereby offering a robust foundation for clinical decision-making processes for acutely brain-injured patients.

Philippe Schlenker, Ambre Salis, Maël Leroux, Camille Coye, Luigi Rizzi, Shane Steinert-Threlkeld, Emmanuel Chemla (2024). Minimal Compositionality versus Bird Implicatures: two theories of ABC-D sequences in Japanese tits. Biological reviews.doi: 10.1111/brv.13068.

Résumé :
It was argued in a series of experimental studies that Japanese tits (Parus minor) have an ABC call that has an alert function, a D call that has a recruitment function, and an ABC-D call that is compositionally derived from ABC and D, and has a mobbing function. A key conclusion was that ABC-D differs from the combination of separate utterances of ABC and of D (e.g. as played by distinct but close loudspeakers). While the logic of the argument is arguably sound, no explicit rule has been proposed to derive the meaning of ABC-D from that of its parts. We compare two analyses. One posits a limited instance of semantic compositionality (‘Minimal Compositionality’); the other does without compositionality, but uses instead a more sophisticated pragmatics (‘Bird Implicatures’). Minimal Compositionality takes the composition of ABC and D to deviate only minimally from what would be found with two independent utterances: ABC means that ‘there is something that licenses an alert’, D means that ‘there is something that licenses recruitment’, and ABC-D means that ‘there is something that licenses both an alert and recruitment’. By contrast, ABC and D as independent utterances yield something weaker, namely: ‘there is something that licenses an alert, and there is something that licenses recruitment’, without any ‘binding’ across the two utterances. The second theory, Bird Implicatures, only requires that ABC-D should be more informative than ABC, and/or than D. It builds on the idea, proposed for several monkey species, that a less-informative call competes with a more informative one (the ‘Informativity Principle’): when produced alone, ABC and D trigger an inference that ABC-D is false. We explain how both Minimal Compositionality and Bird Implicatures could have evolved, and we compare the predictions of the two theories. Finally, we extend the discussion to some chimpanzee and meerkat sequences that might raise related theoretical problems.

Aït Touati, F., Blanc, N., Casati, R., Durand, S., Granjou, C., Martin, N., Mounet, C., Petit, E., Ripoll, T., (2024). Vivre avec les changements climatiques. In: Maljean-Dubois, S., Vermeersch, S., Deboulet, A., Les sociétés face aux défis climatiques. CNRS Editions. ISBN 9782271151414, 201-231.

Résumé :
La réalité du changement climatique est un fait acquis : les sciences « dures » œuvrent depuis plusieurs années à en rendre compte. Parce que les travaux des sciences humaines et sociales sur ce phénomène sont d’une grande richesse et diversité, il peut sembler difficile d’en avoir une vision d’ensemble. Ces recherches sont pourtant essentielles pour mieux comprendre, lutter contre et s’adapter au changement climatique. En réunissant juristes, économistes, anthropologues, archéologues, géographes, historiens, philosophes, politistes, sociologues et spécialistes de littérature et d’arts, cet ouvrage offre au lecteur une mise en commun de leurs travaux. Il les articule autour de quelques grandes thématiques : décarbonation de la société, transition juste, impacts sur la vie quotidienne, mobilisations et actions en justice, climato-scepticisme, santé publique…
Ce qui caractérise le changement climatique contemporain, à l’heure de l’Anthropocène, est le rôle joué par les êtres humains en société, leurs modes de production et leurs modes de vie. Il existe donc une marge d’action pour contrer les effets déstabilisateurs du changement climatique. Ce dernier exige des sociétés qu’elles inventent de façon juste et solidaire, et en s’appuyant sur les connaissances scientifiques, les conditions d’un avenir commun sur notre planète Terre.

Pablo Fernandez Velasco, Umer Gurchani, Bastien Perroy, Roberto Casati (2024). Social and temporal disorientation during the Covid-19 pandemic: An analysis of 3306 responses to a quantitative questionnaire. British Journal of Psychology. doi:10.1111/bjop.12704

Résumé :
The societal hallmark of the Covid-19 pandemic was a set of mitigation measures such as lockdowns and curfews. The cognitive impact on the public of the resulting spatial, social and temporal constraints is still being investigated. While pandemic time has been extensively studied and mostly described as slowed down and elongated, opposite experimental patterns across national and social contexts leave open an important explanatory gap in order to understand which factor has been causally fundamental in determining the phenomenology of the crisis. In this paper, we use a quantitative questionnaire developed for measuring temporal and social disorientation on a sample of 3306 respondents during an acute phase of restrictions in France. We show that social disorientation greatly contributed to the temporal disruptions experienced during the pandemic. This result reinforces the importance for public authorities to address the compounding effect of feeling isolated during crises.

Hualin Xiao, Antoine Marie, Brent Strickland (2024). Moral commitment to gender equality increases (mis)perceptions of gender bias in hiring. European journal of Social Psychology. doi:10.1002/ejsp.3071

Résumé :
Exploring what modulates people's trust in evidence of hiring discrimination is crucial to the deployment of corrective policies. Here, we explore one powerful source of variation in such judgments: moral commitment to gender equality (MCGE), that is, perceptions of the issue as a moral imperative and as identity-defining. Across seven experiments (N = 3579), we examined folk evaluations of scientific reports of hiring discrimination in academia. Participants who were more morally committed to gender equality were more likely to trust rigorous, experimental evidence of gender discrimination against women. This association between moral commitment and research evaluations was not reducible to prior beliefs, and largely explained a sex difference in people's evaluations on the issue. On a darker note, however, MCGE was associated with increased chances of fallaciously inferring discrimination against women from contradictory evidence. Overall, our results suggest that moral convictions amplify people's myside bias, bringing about both benefits and costs in the public consumption of science.

Arianna Zuanazzi, Pablo Ripollés, Wy Ming Lin, Laura Gwilliams, Jean-Rémi King, David Poeppel (2024). Negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. PLoS Biol. 22(5): e3002622.doi:10.1371/journal.pbio.3002622

Résumé :
Combinatoric linguistic operations underpin human language processes, but how meaning is composed and refined in the mind of the reader is not well understood. We address this puzzle by exploiting the ubiquitous function of negation. We track the online effects of negation (“not”) and intensifiers (“really”) on the representation of scalar adjectives (e.g., “good”) in parametrically designed behavioral and neurophysiological (MEG) experiments. The behavioral data show that participants first interpret negated adjectives as affirmative and later modify their interpretation towards, but never exactly as, the opposite meaning. Decoding analyses of neural activity further reveal significant above chance decoding accuracy for negated adjectives within 600 ms from adjective onset, suggesting that negation does not invert the representation of adjectives (i.e., “not bad” represented as “good”); furthermore, decoding accuracy for negated adjectives is found to be significantly lower than that for affirmative adjectives. Overall, these results suggest that negation mitigates rather than inverts the neural representations of adjectives. This putative suppression mechanism of negation is supported by increased synchronization of beta-band neural activity in sensorimotor areas. The analysis of negation provides a steppingstone to understand how the human brain represents changes of meaning over time.

AGENDA

Prochainement au DEC

Retrouvez les événements organisés par le DEC dans l'agenda du département.

Les séminaires et de conférences sont accessibles sur la chaîne youtube du département, le site des Savoirs de l'ENS, la chaîne youtube de l'école.

À la rentrée à l'ENS

Nuit de l'ENS-PSL

Le vendredi 20 septembre 2024, l’École normale supérieure accueillera la 6ème édition de la Nuit de l’ENS sous le thème de l’Énergie. Nous vous attendons nombreuses et nombreux pour ce grand rendez-vous de la rentrée!

Agenda des événements de l'École



Fête de la science à l'ENS

Dimanche 13 octobre, de 10h à 18h, l'ENS proposera au 24 rue Lhomond, un programme festif, ludique et familial avec des animations comme "Devine ma recherche avec trois objets", des jeux, un escape game, un Fort Boyar, des ateliers, des expositions, et un événement surprise dans le hall du 24 rue Lhomond ! Le programme sera prochainement dévoilé sur le site internet de l'ENS et celui de la Fête de la science.

En dehors de l'ENS

Mieux mobiliser la donnée et l'IA pour la transition écologique

L'Ecolab, laboratoire de l’innovation au service de la transition écologique situé au sein du Commissariat Général du Développement Durable (CGDD) organise, le 9 Juillet 2024 de 9h à 12h30 à l’auditorium de la Tour Séquoia à la Défense, une matinée prospective sur l'éclairage des sciences comportementales face aux enjeux climatiques et environnementaux. L'événement est ouvert à toutes et à tous.

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