National Stereotypes and Robots' Perception: The “Made in” Effect

In the near future, the human social environment worldwide might be populated by humanoid robots. The way we perceive these new social agents could depend on basic social psychological processes such as social categorization. Recent results indicate that humans can make use of social stereotypes when faced with robots based on their characterization as “male” or “female” and a perception of their group membership. However, the question of the application of nationality-based stereotypes to robots has not yet been studied. Given that humans attribute different levels of warmth and competence (the two universal dimensions of social perception) to individuals based in part on their nationality, we hypothesized that the way robots are perceived differs depending on their country of origin. In this study, participants had to evaluate four robots differing in their anthropomorphic shape. For each participant, these robots were presented as coming from one of four different countries selected for their level of perceived warmth and competence. Each robot was evaluated on their anthropomorphic and human traits. As expected, the country of origin's warmth and competence level biased the perception of robots in terms of the attribution of social and human traits. Our findings also indicated that these effects differed according to the extent to which the robots were anthropomorphically shaped. We discuss these results in relation to the way in which social constructs are applied to robots

Cognitive control in audience and coaction conditions : an approach at the interface of experimental social psychology, cognitive psychology and integrative neuroscience

La présence des congénères constitue l’élément de base du contexte social, dont la psychologie sociale expérimentale tente depuis un siècle de comprendre les influences (positives et négatives) et autres mécanismes sous-jacents. Chez l’homme, ces influences repérables sur la cognition dépendent souvent de la capacité évaluative de la personne présente. À l’interface de la psychologie sociale, de la psychologie cognitive et des neurosciences intégratives, notre thèse est que la présence évaluative d’autrui (la présence de l’expérimentateur) affaiblit de manière transitoire le contrôle exécutif, avec une double influence : néfaste dans les activités complexes impliquant un conflit de réponses, et bénéfique dans les activités dont la réussite n’implique que l’émission de réponses automatiques. Nos résultats (quatre études) soutiennent la thèse défendue à partir du couplage de la tâche de Simon (permettant une mesure du contrôle exécutif) ou de son adaptation récente en version partagée (présence d’un coacteur) avec des enregistrements électromyographiques. Ces résultats confortent ainsi notre approche intégrative des influences attachées à la présence d’autrui, dont les implications pratiques sont fortes s’agissant notamment de l’étude des processus cognitifs en laboratoire.The presence of conspecifics is the basic element of the social context, whose experimental social psychology has been trying for a century to understand the influences (positive and negative) and underlying mechanisms. In humans, these influences on cognition often depend on the evaluative capacity of the person present. At the interface of social psychology, cognitive psychology, and integrative neuroscience, our thesis is that the presence of evaluative others (experimenter presence) temporarily weakens executive control, with a negative influence in complex activities involving response conflict, and a beneficial influence in activities requiring only the emission of automatic responses to succeed. Our results (four studies) support our thesis based on the coupling of the Simon task (measuring executive control) or its recent adaptation (shared version implying the presence of a coactor) with electromyographic recordings. Our findings confirm our integrative approach of social presence effects, whose practical implications are strong, particularly with regard to the study of cognitive processes in the laboratory

The attention effect of the social presence: A demonstration with a time paradigm.

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Analyses distributionnelles des tâches Stroop, Simon et Flanker et leur relation avec les capacités en Mémoire de Travail

International audienceLe contrôle cognitif est crucial dans l’adaptation à de nouvelles situations. Il implique l'inhibition et la Mémoire de Travail (MDT) (Botvinick et al., 2001). Les tâches de conflits comme Stroop, Simon et Flanker évaluent les capacités d’inhibition en générant une interférence. Des essais neutres ont été rajoutés dans chaque tâche afin de mieux isoler cet effet d’interférence. Des analyses distributionnelles de type delta plots ont abouti à des résultats remettant en cause des cadres théoriques établis. De plus, des capacités élevées en MDT sont associées à une interférence Simon et Stroop plus faible, mais elles ne montrent aucune capacité prédictive sur la tâche Flanker

Integrating theories of Working Memory

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Is the cognitive system much more robust than anticipated? Dual-task costs and residuals in working memory

International audienceSeveral working memory (WM) theories assume a resource sharing between the maintenanceof information and its processing, whereas other theories suppose that these two functions ofWM rely on different pools of resources. Studies that addressed this question by examiningwhether dual-task costs occur in tasks combining processing and storage have led to mixedresults. Whereas some of them reported symmetric dual-task costs, others found no ornegligible effects, while still others found a reduction in performance in memory but not inprocessing. In the present experiment, we tested whether these discrepancies in results mightbe due to participants strategically prioritizing one component of the task over the other.Thus, we asked participants to perform at their maximum level (i.e. span level) in onecomponent of the dual task and assessed performance on the other. In line with resourcesharing views, results indicated that performing at span on one task strongly degradedperformance on the other, with symmetric costs. However, important residuals in bothprocessing and storage suggested an unexpected resilience of the cognitive system that anyresource-sharing theory must take into account

Social-Facilitation-and-Impairment Effects: From Motivation to Cognition and the Social Brain

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Toward explicit measures of intention to predict information system use: An exploratory study of the role of implicit attitudes

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SOCIAL SIMON EFFECT: CO-REPRESENTATION OR SOCIAL FACILITATION?

20th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive-Neuroscience-Society, San Francisco, CA, APR 13-16, 2013International audienceno abstrac