Social perspective-taking influences on metacognition

International audienceWe often effortlessly take the perceptual perspective of others: we represent some aspect of the environment that others currently perceive. However, taking someone's perspective can interfere with one's perceptual processing: another person's gaze can spontaneously affect our ability to detect stimuli in a scene. But it is still unclear whether our cognitive evaluation of those judgements is also affected. In this study, we investigated whether social perspective-taking can influence participants' metacognitive judgements about their perceptual responses. Participants performed a contrast detection task with a task-irrelevant avatar oriented either congruently or incongruently to the stimulus location. By “blindfolding” the avatar, we tested the influence of social perspective-taking versus domain-general directional orienting. Participants had higher accuracy and perceptual sensitivity with a congruent avatar regardless of the blindfold, suggesting a directional cueing effect. However, their metacognitive efficiency was modulated only by the congruency of a seeing avatar. These results suggest that perceptual metacognitive ability can be socially enhanced by sharing perception of the same objects with others

In Search of Sublime Music

International audienceSince Burke and Kant, even subjectivist approaches to the experience of the sublime have claimed that some objects afford it more than others. In 2021, nearly all the participants in the ANR SublimAE questionnaire gave precise answers when asked to identify a piece of music that elicited in them an experience of the sublime. We analyzed this collection of 128 tracks through Music Information Retrieval (MIR) techniques, in order to determine what sonic traits, if any, distinguished these pieces of "sublime music" from those of a second collection, designated by a control group of respondents who answered a question about an experience of the beautiful.The results did not identify a set of recurrent traits in these putatively sublime pieces, except for minor differences of timbre, like a brighter quality of the spectra. Rather, our study suggests that the topical opposition between sublime and beautiful objects is less adequate to understanding the listening experience, than a dynamic and continuous view of both the objective and the subjective aspects of these aesthetical categories.</div

The conjunction fallacy: confirmation or relevance?

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Facial icons as indexes of emotions and intentions

International audienceVarious objects and artifacts incorporate representations of faces, encompassing artworks like portraits, as well as ethnographic or industrial artifacts such as masks or humanoid robots. These representations exhibit diverse degrees of human-likeness, serving different functions and objectives. Despite these variations, they share common features, particularly facial attributes that serve as building blocks for facial expressions—an effective means of communicating emotions. To provide a unified conceptualization for this broad spectrum of face representations, we propose the term “ facial icons” drawing upon Peirce’s semiotic concepts. Additionally, based on these semiotic principles, we posit that facial icons function as indexes of emotions and intentions, and introduce a significant anthropological theory aligning with our proposition. Subsequently, we support our assertions by examining processes related to face and facial expression perception, as well as sensorimotor simulation processes involved in discerning others’ mental states, including emotions. Our argumentation integrates cognitive and experimental evidence, reinforcing the pivotal role of facial icons in conveying mental states

Prompt Selection Matters: Enhancing Text Annotations for Social Sciences with Large Language Models

Large Language Models have recently been applied to text annotation tasks from social sciences, equalling or surpassing the performance of human workers at a fraction of the cost. However, no inquiry has yet been made on the impact of prompt selection on labelling accuracy. In this study, we show that performance greatly varies between prompts, and we apply the method of automatic prompt optimization to systematically craft high quality prompts. We also provide the community with a simple, browser-based implementation of the method at https://prompt-ultra.github.io/

Questions de contenu en langue des signes de la théorie à la description linguistique via le corpus, les expériences et le travail sur le terrain

International audienceThe theory of language structure informs us about what we should expect when we want to investigate a certain construction. However, reality is often richer than what theories predict. In this study, we start from a theoretically informed set of hypotheses about the structure of wh-questions in sign language, we test them using a sign language corpus, a designed production experiment, and structured fieldwork in three sign languages, Swedish, Greek and French Sign Languages. The results will inform us on what type of contribution each research method can provide to reach accurate language descriptions.La théorie de la structure du langage nous informe sur ce à quoi nous devons nous attendre lorsque nous voulons étudier une construction particulière. Cependant, la réalité est souvent plus prospère que ce que prédisent les théories. Dans cette étude, nous partons d'un ensemble d'hypothèses théoriquement éclairées sur la structure des questions wh en langue des signes ; nous les testons à l'aide d'un corpus de langue des signes, d'une expérience de production conçue et d'un travail de terrain structuré dans trois langues des signes, les langues des signes suédoise, grecque et française. Les résultats nous informeront du type de contribution que chaque méthode de recherche peut apporter pour parvenir à des descriptions linguistiques précises

Intuitive credit attribution and the priority rule

International audienceWhen a good idea is discovered, who gets credit for it? This is an important question in science, the arts, law, and everyday life. We suggest that people have intuitions about credit ownership that depend on three factors: (i) whether the idea suggests the discoverer is competent; (ii) whether the discovery elicits gratitude toward the discoverer; (iii) who the first individual to come up with the idea is. We test these intuitions in three vignette experiments with UK participants, in the context of priority disputes in science. In Experiment 1, participants find a discoverer less competent and award less credit to them for a scientific idea if they perceive that the discoverer could have plagiarized another discoverer, but attributions of credit are also shown to differ from attributions of competence. In Experiment 2, participants are more grateful toward, and award more credit to a discoverer who makes their discovery public. In Experiment 3, participants are more biased toward the first discoverer in terms of credit attribution than in terms of competence attribution or feelings of gratitude. In conclusion, we suggest that intuitions of credit ownership help explain the popularity and endurance of the priority rule in science, by which all the credit of a discovery is supposed to go to the first discoverer

Changer de cap : pour une transition sociale-écologique des pêches

Les scientifiques ont développé une méthodologie innovante pour établir une évaluation inédite du secteur de la pêche en France métropolitaine.Leur étude se base sur le calcul de dix grands indicateurs clés, qui mesurent l’empreinte écologique et la performance économique et sociale de chacune des flottilles de pêche opérant sur la façade atlantique. L’étude dresse ainsi le premier état de santé pluridisciplinaire fiable pour 70% des pêches métropolitaines 01. Étude portant sur les flottilles de l’Atlantique Nord Est, les flottes de la Méditerranée, des DOM TOM et les flottes distantes ne sont pas incluses à ce stade. 02 Le chalut démersal ou chalut de fond est un filet de forme conique remorqué par un navire qui capture des espèces commercialisables situées sur ou à proximité du fond, comme la sole, la morue, la baudroie ou la langoustine. Cet engin qui racle les fonds marins ne doit pas être confondu avec le chalut pélagique, trainé en pleine eau et qui capture des espèces comme le hareng, la sardine, le maquereau…03 En termes d’engins, les métiers de la pêche se divisent entre arts dormants (les filets, les casiers et les lignes) et arts traînants (les dragues, les chaluts et les sennes). Source : https://archimer.ifremer.fr/doc/00784/89603/96190.pdf. Les arts dormants piègent les espèces ciblées de manière passive, en s’appuyant sur leurs comportements de déplacement ou de chasse. Ces recherches mettent en évidence le bilan très clairement négatif de la grande pêche industrielle (navires de plus de 24 mètres) et des flottilles utilisant le chalut de fond 02. Les chalutiers industriels de fond cumulent plusieurs tares écologiques, économiques et sociales : destruction des fonds marins, surexploitation des espèces pêchées, captures massives de juvéniles, faible capacité à créer de l’emploi, faible valeur ajoutée, fort impact carbone et importantes émissions de CO2. Pour un même niveau de capture réalisé dans un milieu sauvage (l’océan), les chalutiers de fond hauturiers et industriels créent 2 à 3 fois moins d’emplois et presque 2 fois moins de valeur ajoutée que les flottes utilisant les arts dormants 03 (les lignes, casiers et filets). A l’inverse, les flottilles de pêche utilisant les arts dormants produisent 23% des débarquements totaux et 37% de la valeur ajoutée, elles ne représentent que 17% des émissions de gaz à effet de serre, 10% de la surexploitation et 0,2% de l’abrasion desfonds marins. Toutefois, elles ont une empreinte importante en matière de captures accidentelles d’espèces sensibles (oiseaux et mammifères marins) qui devra nécessairement diminuer dans une optique de transition

Exposing propaganda: an analysis of stylistic cues comparing human annotations and machine classification

Paper to appear in the EACL 2024 Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Understanding Implicit and Underspecified Language (UnImplicit 2024)This paper investigates the language of propaganda and its stylistic features. It presents the PPN dataset, standing for Propagandist Pseudo-News, a multisource, multilingual, multimodal dataset composed of news articles extracted from websites identified as propaganda sources by expert agencies. A limited sample from this set was randomly mixed with papers from the regular French press, and their URL masked, to conduct an annotation-experiment by humans, using 11 distinct labels. The results show that human annotators were able to reliably discriminate between the two types of press across each of the labels. We propose different NLP techniques to identify the cues used by the annotators, and to compare them with machine classification. They include the analyzer VAGO to measure discourse vagueness and subjectivity, a TF-IDF to serve as a baseline, and four different classifiers: two RoBERTa-based models, CATS using syntax, and one XGBoost combining syntactic and semantic features

Coordination, rather than pragmatics, shapes colexification when the pressure for efficiency is low

International audienceWe investigate the phenomenon of colexification, where a single wordform is associated with multiple meanings. Previous research on colexification has primarily focused on empirical studies of different properties of the meanings that determine colexification, such as semantic similarity or meaning frequency. Meanwhile, little attention was paid to the wordforms' properties, despite being the original approach advocated by Zipf. Our preregistered study examines whether word length influences word choice for colexification using a novel dyadic communication game (N = 64) and a computational model grounded in the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework. Contrary to initial predictions, participants did not exhibit a strong preference for efficient colexification (namely colexifying multiple concepts using short words, when long alternatives are available). The results align more closely with a simpler coordination model, where dyads align on a functioning lexical convention with relatively little influence from the efficiency of that convention. Our study highlights the possibility that colexification choices are strongly determined by the pressure for coordination, with weaker influences from semantic similarity or meaning frequency. This is most likely explained by weak pressure for efficiency in our experimental design