Apoux, F., Laurent, S., Gallego, S., Lelic, D. , Moore, B. & Lorenzi, C. (2025). Effects of Hearing Loss and Hearing Aids on the Perception of Natural Sounds and Soundscapes: A Survey of Hearing Care Professional Opinions. American Journal of Audiology. 1-15. doi:10.1044/2025_AJA-24-00171

Résumé :
Purpose:
The goal was to gain insight into the effects of hearing loss and hearing aids (HAs) on the perception of “natural sounds” and their importance in daily life by documenting the opinions of hearing care professionals (HCPs).

Method:
A questionnaire was designed where HCPs were asked to rate their patients' perception of natural sounds before and after receiving an HA. The online survey was conducted with 301 HCPs in France.

Results:
According to respondents, the incidence of hearing natural sounds increased substantially at the end of the trial period relative to the start, especially for patients living in remote rural areas. Respondents also indicated an increase in listening accuracy, pleasantness, and importance of natural sounds at the end of the trial period. The majority of respondents indicated (a) that their patients find it important to listen to natural sounds and (b) that they are satisfied with their HAs in that respect.

Conclusions:
This study demonstrates the importance of natural sounds for most people with hearing loss. It highlights the effects of HA on patients' awareness of natural sounds and suggests that future research should consider the patients' place of residence.

Bade N., Chung W., Picat L., Dudley R., Mascarenhas S. (2025). Shared mechanisms in pragmatic enrichment with contextual and lexical alternatives. Journal of Memory and Language. Volume 142, 104607, ISSN 0749-596X, doi:10.1016/j.jml.2024.104607.

Résumé :
We explore the role of contextual versus lexical alternatives in pragmatic strengthening using a novel training-with-feedback paradigm. In two experiments, we investigate whether training with inferences over contextual alternatives affects pragmatic strengthening with lexical alternatives, and the other way around. In both Experiments, we find that training that encouraged (or discouraged) pragmatic strengthening of simple disjunctions carried over to complex disjunctions of an unfamiliar kind to our experimental participants. This shows that our novel methodology is effective in training general mechanisms for activating alternatives. In Experiment 2, we showed that this methodology can be made to work across different kinds of alternatives, if certain salience conditions are met.

Dautriche, I., Chemla, E. (2025). Evidence for compositional abilities in one-year-old infants. Commun Psychol 3, 37. doi:10.1038/s44271-025-00222-9

Résumé :
Compositionality is a means of constructing complex objects through the transformation and combination of simpler elements. While it is common to view compositionality as inherently complex, and thus to assume that compositionality is a byproduct of advanced language expertise, we argue otherwise. We propose that, although compositionality produces complex outcomes, the underlying processes are simple and can often be reduced to the general mechanism of function application. Accordingly, we explore the origins of compositionality not only in compositional language but also, and at an earlier stage, in the development of compositional representations and thoughts in young infants. Infants correctly composed simple noun-verb sentences at 14 months, facial expressions with objects at 12 months, and mental physical transformations at 10 months. This offers evidence for function application, the essence of compositionality, in infancy—emerging well before and outside the development of compositional language.

Dubourg E, Chambon V, Baumard N. (2025). Human motivation is organized hierarchically, from proximal (means) to ultimate (ends). Behav Brain Sci. ;48:e31. doi: 10.1017/S0140525X24000542. PMID: 39886860.

Résumé :
Murayama and Jach raise a key problem in behavioral sciences, to which we suggest evolutionary science can provide a solution. We emphasize the role of adaptive mechanisms in shaping behavior and argue for the integration of hierarchical theories of goal-directed cognition and behavioral flexibility, in order to unravel the motivations behind actions that, in themselves, seem disconnected from adaptive goals.

Gil-Salcedo, A., Lunven, M., Jacquemot, C. et al.(2025). Specific contribution of cognitive and motor impairments with functional capacity and dependence in Huntington’s disease. J Neurol 272, 224.doi:10.1007/s00415-025-12982-9

Résumé :

Background
Huntington’s disease (HD) leads to increasing dependence. Unlike psychiatric disorders, motor and cognitive deficits evolve progressively over time. Understanding their specific impact on daily activities is crucial for preserving autonomy. However, because cognitive tasks in HD rely on motor functions, and motor tasks demand cognitive processing, disentangling their specific impact remains a challenge.
Objective
To identify the specific contribution of cognitive and motor impairments on global functional capacity, basic and instrumental activities of daily living (ADL/IADL), and work-related activities (WRA) in HD.
Methods
158 HD mutation carriers, enrolled in the BioHD (NCT01412125) and RepairHD (NCT03119246) studies, were evaluated with the Unified Huntington’s Disease Rating Scale and the SelfCog. The SelfCog assesses motor processing separately from memory, language, executive functions and visuospatial processing. Linear regressions were fitted to assess how functional capacity declined with motor and cognition impairments. Odds of dependence in ADLs, IADLs and WRAs were estimated using logistic regressions.
Results
Cognitive and motor performance were independently associated with functional capacities, though motor performance showed a stronger association than cognitive performance. Decline of all SelfCog cognitive domains contributed to functional decline, with stronger association with global and executive scores compared to language, visuospatial, and memory domains. Higher global and executive deficits were associated with an increased risk of dependence in ADLs, IADLs, and WRAs.
Conclusion
The independent contributions of motor, followed by cognitive—mainly executive—functions to functional decline suggest targeted interventions to preserve autonomy and quality of life in HD.

Kim, Y., Allassonnière-Tang, M., Miton, H. & Morin, O. (2025). The phonology of letter shapes: Feature economy and informativeness in 43 writing systems. Journal of Memory and Language, 142, 104620. doi:10.1016/j.jml.2025.104620

Résumé :
Differentiating letter shapes accurately is a core competence for any reader. Are letter shapes as distinctive as they could be? The visual shapes of letters, contrary to the phonemes of spoken languages, lack a unified description — an equivalent of the phonological features that describe most phonemes in the world’s languages. Using a gamified crowdsourcing approach, we elicited thousands of letter descriptions from lay people for the sets of letter shapes (the scripts) used in 43 diverse writing systems. Using 19,591 letter classifications, contributed by 1,683 participants, who were asked to sort the letters of each script repeatedly into two groups, we extracted a sufficient number of binary classifications (features) to provide a unique description for all letters in the 43 scripts. We show that scripts, compared to phoneme inventories, use more features to produce similar sets of distinct elements. Compared to the phoneme inventories of a large sample of the world’s languages dataset (the P-base dataset, collected by another team), our 43 scripts have lower feature economy (fewer symbols for a given number of features) and lower feature informativeness (a less balanced distribution of feature values). Compared to phonemes, letter shapes require more binary features for a complete description. These features are also less informative in letters than in phonemes: the chances that two random letters in a script differ on any given feature are low. Letter shapes, which have more degrees of freedom than speech sounds, use those degrees of freedom less efficiently.

Salis, A., Molina, A., Mephane-Montel, L. , Chaine, A. , Chemla, E. & Schlenker, P. (2025). No Effect of Note Order on the Response of Coal Tits to Conspecific, Heterospecific and Artificial Mobbing Calls. International journal of behavioural ethology, e13557. doi:10.1111/eth.13557

Résumé :
Most Parid species produce specific, order-constrained mobbing calls. These calls elicit responses from both conspecifics and heterospecifics, with evidence indicating that such responses occur only when the calls are organised in this specific order. One notable exception is the coal tit (Periparus ater), a species that employs similar types of notes, yet does not exhibit clear order constraints within its mobbing sequences. Despite this apparent absence of order constraints, a recent experiment has demonstrated that coal tits may be sensitive to the order of notes in heterospecific calls. Therefore, the relative significance of note order in conspecific and heterospecific communication among coal tits remains unclear. We conducted a playback experiment to examine the effects of note order (natural coal tit order, typical Parid order and reversed order) and species identity (conspecific, familiar heterospecific—the great tit, Parus major, or artificial notes) on coal tit mobbing responses. Our findings indicate that coal tits exhibited a strong response to conspecific calls, regardless of the order of the notes; conversely, they displayed little to no response to heterospecific calls and artificial notes, irrespective of note order. A similar pattern was observed when assessing the general community response. This unexpectedly low response to familiar heterospecific calls may be attributable to a reduced density of great tits in the area we tested: ecological factors, such as community composition, may influence heterospecific mobbing behaviours and the subsequent biological interpretations of playback experiments. This study also underscores the necessity of conducting comparative research on closely related species to evaluate the potential generality of findings, such as strong order constraints recently observed in great tits and Japanese tits.

Saranskaia, I., Gutkin, B. & Zakharov, D. (2025). Aim-based choice of strategy for MEG-based brain state classification. Eur. Phys. J. Spec. Top. doi:10.1140/epjs/s11734-025-01587-y

Résumé :
This review examines how the selection of data representation in magnetoencephalography (MEG) research aligns with the objectives of machine learning (ML)-based brain state classification. We explore how different research goals—ranging from testing deep neural networks (DNNs) to developing accessible clinical diagnostic tools—shape the choice of data representation and feature extraction methods. Sensor-level signals, when paired with classical ML methods such as linear discriminant analysis (LDA) and support vector machines (SVM), offer computational efficiency and simplified preprocessing, making them advantageous for applications such as brain–computer interfaces (BCIs) and rapid diagnostics. They are also effectively utilised by deep learning (DL) models, such as convolutional neural networks (CNNs), particularly in handling high-dimensional raw data. In contrast, reconstructed source signals provide superior spatial localisation, making them better suited for applications requiring anatomical mapping, such as functional connectivity analysis. These signals are often integrated with DL methods for advanced feature extraction or combined with classical ML techniques to enhance interpretability and robustness in lower dimensional settings. By systematically reviewing these approaches, we highlight how study objectives drive data representation choices and discuss their implications for preprocessing strategies and classification methodologies across different MEG applications.

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