Being the chosen one: social inclusion modulates decisions in the ultimatum game. An ERP study

International audienceIn the present study, participants played a modified ultimatum game simulating a situation of inclusion/exclusion, in which either the participant or a rival could be selected to play as the responder. This selection was made either randomly by a computer (i.e. random pairing mode) or by the proposer (i.e. choice mode), based on physical appearance. Being chosen by the proposer triggered positive reciprocal behavior in participants, who accepted unfair offers more frequently than when they had been selected by the computer. Independently of selection mode, greater P200 amplitudes were found when participants received fair offers than when they received unfair offers and when unfair shares were offered to their rivals rather than to them, suggesting that receiving fair offers or observing a rival's misfortune was rewarding for participants. While participants generally showed more interest in the offers they themselves received (i.e. greater P300 responses to these offers), observing their rivals receive fair shares after the latter had been chosen by the proposer triggered an increase in P300 amplitude likely to ref lect a feeling of envy. This study provides new insights into both the cognitive and affective processes underpinning economic decision making in a context of social inclusion/exclusion

The Cognitive Representation of Time and Duration

How do people represent the duration of an event in memory and which mechanisms except timing are involved in processing and maintaining temporal information within the cognitive system? The speakers of this symposium will address this and related questions. Anne-Claire Rattat focuses on long-term retention of durations in children and adults. Ruth Ogden discusses executive functions that are involved in timing and time perception. Hedderik van Rijn and Niels Taagten show how general principles of memory and attention can be connected with theories about time perception. Finally, Daniel Bratzke reviews prominent ideas about how temporal information is coded within and across sensory modalities. The titles and abstracts of the four talks are given below

Maintenance of duration representation in memory in children and adults

International audienc

Temporal Estimation of Familiar Actions in Children and Adults

International audienc

Temporal Categorization of Familiar Actions by Children and Adults

International audienceAlthough it is very useful in daily life, children have difficulties to estimate durations using conventional time units. The aim of the present study was to examine whether young children aged three, five and eight years and adults are able to categorize familiar actions according to their duration, by using a new task not relying on knowledge of conventional time units. Participants performed a forced-choice categorization task in which short, medium or long target action durations had to be paired with one of three comparison action durations (short, medium or long). Results showed that as age increased so, too, did the percentage of accurate temporal categorizations, while that of temporal categorization errors decreased. Moreover, except at three years, the least frequent error consisted in categorizing a short action as a long one. These results are discussed in the light of event representation theory and the role of experience in temporal cognition

Le développement des conduites d'estimation du temps chez l'enfant (le rôle de la mémoire à long terme dans le cadre des modèles d'horloge interne)

CLERMONT FD-BCIU Lettr./Sci.Hum. (631132101) / SudocSudocFranceF

Implicit long-term memory for duration in young children

International audienceThe aim of the present study was to investigate young children’s ability to maintain in long-term memory a duration of an action they have previously experienced (i.e., implicit long-term memory for duration). Children aged 3 and 5 years were trained to produce an action for 5 s by simultaneous imitation of the experimenter’s action. Then, they were tested after a retention interval lasting for 1, 24, or 48 hours (Experiment 1), or 6 days, 6 weeks, or 6 months (Experiment 2). The results showed that the young children remembered the learned duration after 48 hours and 6 months at the age of 3 and 5 years, respectively, although the temporal performance decreased at the 1 hour and the 6 weeks retention intervals for the first and the second age group. These findings are discussed in the framework of a discrepancy in the memory retention of duration as a function of the nature of the memory system, i.e., implicit or explicit

Time flies faster under time pressure

International audienceWe examined the effects of time pressure on duration estimation in a verbal estimation task and a production task. In both temporal tasks, participants had to solve mazes in two conditions of time pressure (with or without), and with three different target durations (30 s, 60 s, and 90 s). In each trial of the verbal estimation task, participants had to estimate in conventional time units (minutes and seconds) the amount of time that had elapsed since they started to solve the maze. In the production task, they had to press a key while solving the maze when they thought that the trial's duration had reached a target value. Results showed that in both tasks, durations were judged longer with time pressure than without it. However, this temporal overestimation under time pressure did not increase with the length of the target duration. These results are discussed within the framework of scalar expectancy theory

Timing in time perception and prospective memory

International audienc