Jean-Rémy Hochmann's Quick Files

The Quick Files feature was discontinued and it’s files were migrated into this Project on March 11, 2022. The file URL’s will still resolve properly, and the Quick Files logs are available in the Project’s Recent Activity

How can it be both abstract and perceptual? Comment on Hafri, A., & Firestone, C. (2021), The perception of relations, Trends in Cognitive Sciences

In their provocative article The perception of relations, Hafri and Firestone (H&F) argue that the processing of abstract relations such as SUPPORT, FIT, CAUSE and even SOCIALLY INTERACT, displays key signatures of perception: those relations are extracted rapidly and spontaneously from visual input, cannot be ignored, and influence other perceptual processes. They conclude, not only that perception is involved in processing relations, but that perception represents abstract relations. The latter conclusion sounds –at least– ahead of its time

Infants' understanding of the causal power of agents and tools

Tools are objects that can be manipulated by agents with the intention to cause an effect in the world. We show that the cognitive capacity to understand tools is present in young infants, even if these produce arbitrary, causally opaque effects. In Experiments 1-2, we used pupillometry to show that 8-month-old infants infer an invisible causal contact to account for the –otherwise unexplained– motion of a ball. In Experiments 3, we probed 8-month-old infants’ account of a state change event (flickering of a box) that lies outside of the explanatory power of intuitive physics. Infants repeatedly watched an intentional agent launch a ball behind an occluder. After a short delay, a cube, positioned at the other end of the occluder began flickering. Rare unoccluded events served to probe infants’ representation of what happened behind the occluder. Infants exhibited larger pupil dilation, signaling more surprise when the ball stopped before touching the cube, than when it contacted the cube, suggesting that infants inferred that the cause of the state change was contact between the ball and the cube. This effect was canceled in Experiment 4, when an inanimate sphere replaced the intentional agent. Altogether, results suggest that, in the infants’ eyes, the power of the ball to cause an arbitrary state change must be inherited from an intentional agent. Eight-month-olds are thus capable of representing complex event structures, involving an intentional agent causing a change with a tool

Comment les nourrissons comprennent le pouvoir des agents et des outils

International audienceTools are objects that are manipulated by agents with the intention to cause an effect in the world. We show that the cognitive capacity to understand tools is present in young infants, even if these tools produce arbitrary, causally opaque effects. In experiments 1–2, we used pupillometry to show that 8-mo-old infants infer an invisible causal contact to account for the—otherwise unexplained—motion of a ball. In experiments 3, we probed 8-mo-old infants’ account of a state change event (flickering of a cube) that lies outside of the explanatory power of intuitive physics. Infants repeatedly watched an intentional agent launch a ball behind an occluder. After a short delay, a cube, positioned at the other end of the occluder began flickering. Rare unoccluded events served to probe infants’ representation of what happened behind the occluder. Infants exhibited larger pupil dilation, signaling more surprise, when the ball stopped before touching the cube, than when it contacted the cube, suggesting that infants inferred that the cause of the state change was contact between the ball and the cube. This effect was canceled in experiment 4, when an inanimate sphere replaced the intentional agent. Altogether, results suggest that, in the infants’ eyes, a ball (an inanimate object) has the power to cause an arbitrary state change, but only if it inherits this power from an intentional agent. Eight-month-olds are thus capable of representing complex event structures, involving an intentional agent causing a change with a tool

Negative mental representations in infancy

How do infants’ thoughts compare to the thoughts adults express with language? In particular, can infants entertain negative representations, such as not red or not here? In four experiments, we used pupillometry to ask whether negative representations are possible without an external language. Eleven-month-olds were tested on their ability to detect and represent the abstract structure of sequences of syllables, defined by the relations identity and/or negation: AAAA (four identical syllables; Experiment 1), AAA¬A (three times the syllable A and one final syllable that is not A; Experiment 2), AA(A)(A)¬A (two-to-four times the syllable A and one final syllable that is not A; Experiment 3). Representing the structures in Experiments 2-3 requires a form of negation. Results suggest that infants are able to compute both identity and negation. More generally, these results lend credit to the hypothesis that the infant mind is equipped with rudimentary logical operators before language takes off

The Default Computation of Negated Meanings

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Word frequency as a cue for identifying function words in infancy. Cognition

a b s t r a c t While content words (e.g., 'dog') tend to carry meaning, function words (e.g., 'the') mainly serve syntactic purposes. Here, we ask whether 17-month old infants can use one language-universal cue to identify function word candidates: their high frequency of occurrence. In Experiment 1, infants listened to a series of short, naturally recorded sentences in a foreign language (i.e., in French). In these sentences, two determiners appeared much more frequently than any content word. Following this, infants were presented with a visual object, and simultaneously with a word pair composed of a determiner and a noun. Results showed that infants associated the object more strongly with the infrequent noun than with the frequent determiner. That is, when presented with both the old object and a novel object, infants were more likely to orient towards the old object when hearing a label with a new determiner and the old noun compared to a label with a new noun and the old determiner. In Experiment 2, infants were tested using the same procedure as in Experiment 1, but without the initial exposure to French sentences. Under these conditions, infants did not preferentially associate the object with nouns, suggesting that the preferential association between nouns and objects does not result from specific acoustic or phonological properties. In line with various biases and heuristics involved in acquiring content words, we provide the first direct evidence that infants can use distributional cues, especially the high frequency of occurrence, to identify potential function words

Conscious processing of auditory regularities induces a pupil dilation

Abstract Pupil dilation has been reliably identified as a physiological marker of consciously reportable mental effort. This classical finding raises the question of whether or not pupil dilation could be a specific somatic signature of conscious processing. In order to explore this possibility, we engaged healthy volunteers in the ‘local global’ auditory paradigm we previously designed to disentangle conscious from non-conscious processing of novelty. We discovered that consciously reported violations of global (inter-trials) regularity were associated with a pupil dilation effect both in an active counting task and in a passive attentive task. This pupil dilation effect was detectable both at the group-level and at the individual level. In contrast, unreported violations of this global regularity, as well as unreported violations of local (intra-trial) regularity that do not require conscious access, were not associated with a pupil dilation effect. We replicated these findings in a phonemic version of the ‘local global’. Taken together these results strongly suggest that pupil dilation is a somatic marker of conscious access in the auditory modality, and that it could therefore be used to easily probe conscious processing at the individual level without interfering with participant’s stream of consciousness by questioning him/her