Voici les éléments 1 - 10 sur 13
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Emotions and Evaluative Knowledge. A Perspective on Epistemic and Moral Potential of Anger
    (2024-01-25)
    Gambaro, Antoinette
    ;
    This thesis aims to explore emotions from an epistemic and normative philosophical perspective, delineating their indispensability for evaluative knowledge, and elucidating ways to promote this specific form of knowledge. Specifically, I will focus on the emotion of anger, given its tendency to provoke heightened disagreements among philosophers in moral and normative domains. I will advocate for an attitudinalist account, which, in comparison to other theories, appears to better explicate the epistemic role of all emotions, including anger. According to the attitudinalist account, anger grants us insight into the reasons behind the offensiveness of a situation or event. The text delves not only into the potential epistemic role of anger but also its moral implications within a democratic context, as its expression fosters evaluative knowledge crucial for combating social injustice. Finally, I defend an epistemic perspectivism; emotions concern an alternative form of knowledge that diverges from the traditional paradigm in that it does not seek absolute objectivity; rather, truth is contingent upon the emotional experiences of the subject.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Linking musical metaphors, emotions and feelings of entrainment evoked by electronic music: From the physical properties of sounds to the experience of listening to music
    (Neuchâtel : Université de Neuchâtel, 2024-01-01)
    Politi, Stefano
    ;
    ;
    Didier Grandjean
    This paper proposes a perspective on the experience of listening to music, where sounds are conceived as objects of auditory perception in interaction with the listener’s body. This interaction in considered to be a continuous process of attributing meaning by the listener, based on the possibility of action in accordance to the music; to possibility to move to – or to be moved by – the music, both metaphorically and literally. Musical meaning is, here, understood in terms of metaphors and emotions. In this paper, the relationships between metaphors and emotions are analyzed from the perspective of embodied (music) cognition, which considers the body as central for cognitive (musical) processing. The phenomena of the body synchronizing to the music, as a consequence of it’s interaction with it, is referred to as rhythmic entrainment (Trost et al., 2017). Within this theoretical framework, an enactivist standpoint affirms that action tendencies are intertwined with perception. According to such, physical (acoustic) properties of sounds are cognitively mapped through sensorimotor (bodily) representations: a process of attributing musical meaning to the interaction between the listener with the music. Listening to music necessarily implies processing sequences of sounds through time, often conceptualized in terms of metaphors of (bodily) motion – embodied musical meaning (Johnson, 1997). The motion of music through time is considered to be understood by the listener in terms of how this motion is reflected as motion in the body, whether though overt movements (as dancing) or covert sensations (as introspective emotions). Describing the experience of listening to music in terms of metaphorical and emotional language sheds light on how bodily motion is associated with musical motion, through the process of attribution of embodied musical meaning. The core of this paper is based on an empirical study conducted with the aim to explore interactions between the physical (acoustic) properties of sounds and the experience of listening to music. By doing so, this study also aims to provide a scientific contribution to an embodied (music) cognition framework. Two categories of electronic music (ambient and dance) were considered as inclined to exert rather sedative or stimulative effects on the body of the listener. The study was composed of three phases, and combines tools from Computational Sciences and Music Psychology. The first phase consisted in the extraction and analyses of a set of acoustic features with the MIR toolbox (Lartillot & Toiviainen, 2007), from 16 electronic music excerpts (length of 30 seconds). In the second phase, 172 participants evaluated the music through an online survey. They rated items of the Geneva Musical Metaphors Scale (GEMMES) (Schaerlaeken et al., 2019), to assess musical metaphors, of the Geneva Emotional Music Scale (GEMS) (Zenter et al., 2008), and the two-dimensional emotional model of valance and arousal (Russel, 1980), to assess musical emotions, and of the Musical Entrainment Questionnaire (MEQ) (Labbé & Grandjean, 2014), to assess subjective feelings of entrainment. In both phases, data was analyzed with Principal Component Analysis (PCA), to obtain a few relevant groups of variables based on the correlations between them. The third phase consisted in computing linear mixed-effects models, in order to explore the interaction between the physical properties of music (acoustic features) and the experience of listening to music (survey ratings). Finally, results of all three phases were compared with those from a similar study on classical music (Schaerlaeken et al., 2022). The first phase resulted in in two principal components of acoustic features; two groups of mathematical descriptors of sound-waves associated with perceptual characteristics of music. Dance music was associated with high timbre (in terms of frequency spectrum and energy), simple rhythms and regular structure, while the opposite was true for ambient music. The comparison with classical music indicated that acoustic features related to timbre and rhythm are core descriptors, independently of genre, whereas those related to structure/dynamics were particularly relevant only for electronic music. The second phase also resulted two principal components, to describe the participant’s evaluations of the music. Dance music was most represented by elements associated with overt motion (i.e. body movements): metaphors of “Movement” and “Force”, emotions of “Power”, “Joyful Activation” and “Tension”, as well as arousal and feelings of entrainment. On the other hand, ambient music was most represented by elements associated with to covert motion (i.e. internal body sensations): metaphors of “Wandering”, “Flow” and “Interior”, emotions of “Wonder”, “Ten- derness”, “Peacefulness”, “Nostalgia”, “Sadness” and “Transcendence”. This supports an understanding of embodied music cognition, where the differences between dance and ambient electronic music mirror the differences between stimulative and sedative influences of music on the body of the listener. Furthermore, the two groups of correlations were consistent with the results found with classical music, suggesting similarities in how meaning is attributed to the music through embodied experiences of motion. The third phase showed that acoustic features associated with the perception of timbre, rhythm and structure influence how ambient and dance music are evaluated by the listeners. As a general trend, higher frequency spectrum and more regular structure was correlated with higher ratings of overt motion elements. However, specific trends also apply to each category of electronic music. Ambient music was rated higher for covert motion and lower for overt motion in excerpts with lower energy, irregular structure and complex rhythm. For dance music, the peak of highest ratings for overt motion and lowest for covert motion in excerpts with moderate energy, regular structure and simple rhythm. Ratings for overt motion decrease and those for covert motion increase, if energy is too high, structure too regular and rhythm too simple. This pattern is not the reciprocal of the one found for ambient music. This may be a reflection of the importance of violations of musical expectations as a major component of musical meaning (Meyer, 1956). In this sense, dance music would have more potential to induce action, if containing a balanced degree of complexity and irregularity. Otherwise, the music becomes too predictable and the listener feels less inclined to move. By exploring the link between acoustic features of sound and subjective evaluation of music, this study contributes to bridging the gap between MIR technology and music psychology (Acounturier & Bigand, 2013; Siedenburg et al., 2016). The choice of electronic music is also of scientific interest in itself, as it is a rapidly expanding contemporary genre of music, which is only marginally addressed in scientific research, in comparison to classical music for instance. Furthermore, the study contributes to a framework of embodied music cognition framework in two ways. First and foremost, the results are consistent with those of Schaerlaeken et al. (2022), linking feelings of entrainment with specific metaphors and emotions into two main clusters which broadly represent two modes of bodily interaction with the music (overt and covert motion). This study explores a different genre of music (electronic), and as such reinforces their ecological validity. Secondly, the conceptual framework mobilized to interpret the results provides tools to consider the role of the body in the construal of musical meaning. An enactivist perspective of cognition adequately accounts for differences between categories of electronic music (ambient and dance), with respects to diverging tendencies of action that the music can afford to the listener. The degree to which the results of the study are generalizable depends mainly on two limitations. Firstly, all participants to the online survey belonged to WEIRD (Western-Educated-Industrialized-Rich-Democratic) population samples (Apicella, Norenzayan & Henrich, 2020). Considering the culturally-dependent nature of metaphors (Dancygier & Sweetser, 2014; Nuñez & Cooperrider, 2006; Zbikowski, 2008) and of emotions (Le Breton, 2021), the results cannot be generalized outide of WEIRD population. Secondly, the sample size of the music selection was relatively small (16 excerpts) and the range of different styles of music was limited and relatively polarized (ambient vs. dance). For the conclusions to be more robust, similar studies would have to be replicated with a wider variety and diversity of music. The study, with it’s strengths and limitations, enlightens a few orientations for further research. The first points towards bridging the gap between MIR technology and music psychology, by promoting cross-disciplinary research and applications. It would be relevant for research in music psychology to explore different methodologies of MIR analysis, which are currently used to categorize large databases of music (Aucouturier & Pachet, 2003; Chen, 2014; Defferrand et al., 2016; Diakopoulos, 2009; Kirss, 2007; Lefaivre & Zhang, 2018; Nie, 2022). This approach would greatly benefit also from the integration of perceptual features (Aljanaki & Soleymani; 2018), as they provide a good mediator between the physical (acoustic) properties of sounds and the psychological phenomenology of listening to music. The second orientation refers to laboratory research. It would be relevant to investigate the neural correlates of rhythmic entrainment and action-perception coupling, while participants passively listen to music. This can be investigated by collecting EEG data of mu waves over the motor-related brain areas (Anderson, 2020; Fox et al., 2016; Hari, 2006; Pineda, 2005; Ross, 2022; Wu et al., 2016). This could further be integrated with physiological data (Bartlett, 1996; Gaston, 1951; Hodges, 2016; Matyja, 2016), in order to establish correlations between neural, physiological and subjective entrainment as well as emotional reactions. In addition, motion caption studies can be designed to further explore motor entrainment and specific movements associated with dancing to different styles of music (Toiviainen & Carlson, 2022). Finally, these previous orientations could be combined with ethnographical fieldwork in a fundamentally inter-disciplinary approach. This would imply contextually-situated qualitative research, based on the observation and analysis of individual movements and social interactions during live music performances. Unlike in a laboratory setting, this could shed light on phenomena social entrainment (Garcia, 2020; Witek, 2019). A mixed approach, able to integrate laboratory-based and fieldwork-based methodologies, would contribute to a holistic understanding of the experience of listening to music, from a perceptual, physiological, motor and social integrated perspective. Furthermore, intercultural studies could additionally shed light on universal vs. cultural aspects of music cognition. Bottom-up methodologies, similar to those involved in the creation of the GEMS and GEMMES, can be used to establish cross-cultural comparisons in musically-relevant metaphorical and emotional labels. These opportunities for future scientific research also reflect potential societal applications. Firstly, it contributes to the inclusion of perceptual and cognitive aspects in the classification of music. Music providers which deal with large databases of music could improve their services by adopting concepts as metaphors, emotions and entrainment in complement of a classification methodology purely based on acoustic features of sound. Music psychology has the potential to provide insight where MIR technology finds its limitations. Secondly, music composition and performance can surely benefit from a better understanding of how meaning is conveyed through music, and the role of the body in this process. Metaphorical and emotional concepts can aid musicians to better comprehend their own intentions of expression through music and how to do so through with, and through their bodies. Similarly, such aspects can also have a positive influence in the field of music education. Metaphorical and emotional language is useful to transmit knowledge and insight from the teacher to the student.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    From learning about social categories to holding stereotypes. Investigating the acquisition of stereotypes in childhood and their effects on adults’ information processing
    Assuming that boys are better at math than girls, expecting that Swiss people love to eat chocolate, or inferring that senior citizens are not at ease with new technologies, all reflect stereotypical expectations about specific social categories. The term “stereotype” refers to shared sets of expectancies about the likely personality, behaviors, preferences, or physical features of social category members. From a cognitive perspective, stereotypes are energy saving devices – mental shortcuts – that allow perceivers to spare processing costs when navigating their complex social environment. Yet, inferring people’s preferences, behaviors, or personality from their category membership can also lead to incorrect predictions, to offensive assumptions, or even to discriminatory behaviors. The present dissertation aims to shed light on the mechanisms by which we form expectations about social categories, and how these expectations impact information processing. Specifically, the first part of this dissertation provides a developmental perspective on how children learn about social categories. It specifically examines how children learn to make inferences about social categories, and the conditions under which children start attributing properties to social category members. The second part of this dissertation turns to the resulting stereotypes that adults hold about social categories, and how these stereotypes modulate information processing. This part focuses on the mental processes that underlie stereotyping and assesses how the processing of written texts is affected by items that confirm versus contradict stereotypical expectations. Together, this dissertation provides a cognitive and developmental perspective on the acquisition of stereotypes and their later effects on information processing. In doing so, this dissertation will hopefully bring a better comprehension of the foundational cognitive processes that underlie stereotyping and its consequences.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    An electroencephalographic approach to the processing of ambiguous stimuli under social influence:: the role of perception, attention, emotion and metacognition
    (2019) ; ;
    Pegna, Alan J.
    ;
    Maurer, Roland
    ;
    Krummenacher, Joseph
    Les êtres humains, en tant qu'êtres sociaux, sont susceptibles d'influence sociale dans leurs jugements, leurs croyances et leurs comportements. Au cours des 70 dernières années, une grande quantité de données issues de la psychologie sociale expérimentale a démontré que les connaissances sociales affectent la façon dont les humains perçoivent et interprètent leur environnement, ce qui entraîne des biais cognitifs, perceptuels, attentionnels et motivationnels. Déjà dans les années 50, Solomon Ash (1951), dans une série d’expériences de jugement perceptuel, démontrait que les humains pouvaient modifier leurs réponses lorsque celles-ci différaient de la majorité. De plus, il a été démontré que le degré d’incertitude provoqué par des stimuli environnementaux augmentait la vulnérabilité de l’homme à l’opinion sociale. Plus récemment, les neurosciences ont commencé à explorer les réponses cérébrales inconscientes et contrôlées aux stimuli sociaux, principalement les expressions de visages. À ce jour, toutefois, le déroulement temporel des processus d’attention et de perception dans des situations d’incertitude et de conflits sociaux reste flou, en particulier en ce qui concerne la perception de stimuli ambigus, autres que les visages, dans un contexte social. L'objectif des trois études de cette thèse était donc de déterminer si la perception précoce et les processus cognitifs d'ordre supérieur étaient altérés lorsque des sujets tout-venants ainsi que des sujets présentant une anxiété sociale, étaient face à des stimuli ambigus et que leurs réponses étaient soit approuvées, soit contestées. Pour cela, un nouveau paradigme expérimental a été créé, nous permettant de mesurer les potentiels évoqués (ERP) en réponse à des stimuli visuels, avant et après le retour social (expression heureuse/accord ou de dégoût/désaccord). Les participants ont été invités à juger la couleur d'un carré (la sonde) qui était soit clairement bleu ou vert (sondes distinctes), soit de couleur bleue-verte très ambiguë (sondes ambiguës). On leur a également demandé d'indiquer leur degré de confiance à l'égard de leurs jugements, après avoir reçu le feed-back social approuvant ou contestant leurs réponses. Le même stimulus est ensuite présenté à nouveau et les participants sont invités à reconsidérer leur décision et leur niveau de confiance subjective. Les résultats comportementaux chez les sujets sains, ont montré que les niveaux de confiance diminuaient alors que le nombre de révisions augmentait, à la fois en raison de la difficulté de la tâche et du feedback social. Cette tendance était renforcée chez les personnes socialement anxieuses. Les données de potentiels évoqués ont révélé des différences commençant déjà à 100ms après la présentation des stimuli ambigus. Ces résultats démontrent une modification précoce des processus visuels par une facilitation sensorielle accrue de l'information lorsque les sujets se trouvent en situation d’incertitude et sous pression sociale. Cette même configuration était réduite chez les sujets anxieux sociaux, ce qui suggère une réduction des processus attentionnels précoces aux stimuli ambigus externes en raison d'une focalisation excessive sur soi et d'une anticipation de la situation sociale. De plus, les composantes ERP tardives, commençant à environ 300 ms, étaient diminuées pour les stimuli distincts par rapport aux ambiguës, conformément à une plus grande détection de précision du signal de précision et à des expériences métacognitives. Dans l’ensemble, les résultats indiquent que la perception inconsciente des stimuli dans l’environnement social est modifiée lorsque les sujets sont confrontés à l’incertitude et à la pression sociale. Ces processus perceptuels sont atténués dans la population socialement anxieuse, alors que les processus métacognitifs commencent plus tard, lorsque les attributs physiques des stimuli renvoient vers un sentiment de certitude., Humans, as social beings, are susceptible to social influence in their judgements, beliefs and behaviours. Over the last 70 years, a great wealth of data from experimental social psychology has demonstrated that social knowledge affects the way humans perceive and interpret their environment, giving rise to cognitive, perceptual, attentional and motivational biases. Already in the 1950’s, Solomon Ash (1951), in a series of perceptual judgement experiments, demonstrated that humans could alter their responses when these differed from a majority. Moreover, the degree of uncertainty triggered by stimuli in the environment has been shown to increase human’s vulnerability to social opinion. More recently, neuroscience began to explore automatic unconscious and controlled conscious brain responses to social stimuli, mainly face expressions. To date, however, the temporal unfolding of attentional and perceptual processes under uncertainty and social conflict remains unclear, particularly regarding the perception of ambiguous stimuli other than faces in a social context. Thus, the aim of the three studies in this thesis, was to investigate whether early perception and higher order cognitive processes were altered when healthy and socially anxious subjects were presented with ambiguous stimuli and when their responses were either endorsed or disputed. For this, a novel experimental paradigm was created allowing us to measure event-related potentials (ERPs) in response to visual stimuli, before and after social feedback indicated by a face displaying a happy (agreement) or disgusted expression (disagreement). Participants were asked to judge the colour of a square (the probe) that was either clearly blue or green (distinct probes) or were highly ambiguous bluish-green colour (ambiguous probes). They were also asked to indicate their level of confidence in those judgments, after which they received social feedback either endorsing or disputing the participants’ responses. Participants were then presented the stimulus again and asked to reconsider their decision and subjective confidence level. Behavioural results showed that confidence levels decreased whereas the number of revisions increased, both with task difficulty and with conflicting social feedback across healthy subjects. Moreover, this pattern was enhanced across socially anxious individuals. Event-related-potential data revealed differences beginning at already 100 ms after ambiguous stimuli presentations compared to distinct stimuli, as well as enhanced early amplitudes following disputed feedback. These findings are compatible with heightened sensory facilitation of visual information, demonstrating that uncertainty and social pressure modify early perceptual brain processes. The same pattern was reduced across socially anxious individuals suggesting a reduction in early attentional processes to external ambiguous stimuli due to excessive self-focusing and anticipation of the social situation. Additionally, later ERP components, starting at around 300 ms, were decreased for distinct stimuli compared to ambiguous probes in line with higher subjects’ signal detection accuracy and metacognitive experiences. Overall, findings indicate that unconscious perception to stimuli in social environments are modified when subjects are faced with uncertainty and social pressure and that these perceptual processes are diminished in the socially anxious population, whereas, self-awareness metacognitive processes begin at a later stage when subjects are certain about the physical attributes of the stimuli.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Learning from others: emotion appreciation and the informative case of interest
    This thesis concerns emotion recognition. More precisely, it concerns how we recognise how other people are feeling and how they are likely to act as a consequence. The introduction considers the orthodox approach to emotion recognition which focuses on facial expression and explains why this can only be a part of the story. In short, if emotions are relational, and, as such, describe the relation between the person and the object they are looking at, then facial expression is only one piece of evidence, among many, that can be used to infer how the other is feeling and what they are going to do next. In chapter 1 (taken from Clément and Dukes, 2013), I point out that there are a number of similar terms that are used to describe inter-relational instances of emotion recognition, instances when onlookers can use the information in the emotional expression for themselves. One example, social referencing, describes how children as young as 12 months old can use the affective information provided in the expression of an other as a guide to how they themselves should behave – whether they should cross a visual cliff or not. In chapters 2 and 3 (taken from Clément and Dukes (2017) and Dukes and Clément (2017) respectively, I distinguish between social referencing and another phenomena, social appraisal, and place them at the heart of a new concept, affective social learning, that brings together various types of such phenomena. In short, while social learning describes how we can use others' actions to learn how to use an object, affective social learning describes how we can use others' expressions to learn how to value an object: should I be frightened of the dog if Sarah is, should I be disgusted by the joke if Deborah is? And this learning can be transgenerational - a conduit for the transmission and perpetuation of cultures of value. For example, if a child is in a football-loving family, a racist family, or a devoutly religious family, the child could pick up on how the family members feel about these 'objects' to learn to appreciate football, hate foreigners or to love a particular deity. In short, picking up this type of affective information about how to value the objects in our environment must be, I argue, more subtle than focusing on facial expression. Having shown, through the example of affective social learning, how the explanatory power of emotion is increased when emotion recognition is considered in this novel way, in Chapter 4 (taken from Reschke, Walle and Dukes, 2017), attention turns here to social cognition. Taking three classic developmental social cognition experiments, I argue that the reported behaviour of the children might be better understood if we consider their appreciation of the relations between the person and the objects and her goals. For example, while it has been shown that 18-month olds will help people open cupboard doors, they may do this because they have understood that the person is frustrated – particularly when the person knocks up against the wardrobe in a repetitive manner while their arms are full of books. Having argued in chapter 1 that the emotion of interest might play a particularly important part in how we learn from others about the value of the objects in our environment, Chapter 5 (taken from Dukes, Clément, Audrin and Mortillaro, 2017) provides evidence that it is only possible for adults to recognise interest in others when the interest is expressed dynamically (in short films) or, even more successfully, when the expression is presented in whole-body form. In other words, and in line with a host of previous evidence in the literature, a static, facial expression of interest is very difficult to recognise without further clues. In chapter 6, we use this information to test how the expression of interest in an adult affects how infants behave. While children aged 9 months seemed insensitive to the expression, 12-month-olds were significantly more likely to choose an object that had previously been looked at with interest rather than one that had previously been ooked at with distinterest. Surprisingly, children aged 15 months were significantly more likely to choose the object that had previously been looked at with disinterest. The thesis concludes by asking how far this idea of using a more relational approach to emotion recognition can go, and whether it would be possible to include other social relations (for example, competition, dominance, cooperation) in the environment to create an even more holistic approach. Résumé Cette thèse porte sur la reconnaissance des émotions. Plus précisément, elle s’intéresse à la manière avec laquelle on parvient à percevoir les sentiments des autres et la manière dont ils sont, par conséquent, susceptibles d’agir. L’introduction explique en quoi l’approche orthodoxe de la reconnaissance des émotions qui se concentre sur les expressions faciales n’est pas exhaustive. En bref, si les émotions sont relationnelles et décrivent par conséquent la relation entre la personne et l’objet qu’elle regarde, alors l’expression faciale n’est qu’un élément de preuve parmi d’autres moyens qui peuvent être utilisés pour comprendre les sentiments de l’autre et sa manière d’agir ensuite. Dans le premier chapitre (pris de Clément and Dukes, 2013), je mets en avant le fait qu’il existe plusieurs termes similaires pour décrire des situations interrelationnelles de reconnaissance des émotions, situations durant lesquelles le spectateur peut utiliser pour lui-même des informations émanant de l’expression émotionnelle d’autrui. Pour donner un exemple, social referencing décrit la manière avec laquelle des enfants dès 12 mois peuvent utiliser une information affective décelée dans l’expression de quelqu’un d’autre pour les guider quant à la manière dont ils doivent eux-mêmes agir. Dans les chapitres 2 et 3, (pris de Clément and Dukes, 2017 et Dukes and Clément, 2017), je fais la distinction entre le social referencing et un autre phénomène, social apprasial, et je les place au coeur d’un nouveau concept, affective social Learning, qui rassemble plusieurs variations de ce même phénomène. En résumé, au même titre que social Learning décrit la manière dont on peut utiliser les actions d’autrui pour apprendre à utiliser un objet, affective social Learning décrit la manière dont on peut utiliser les expressions d’autrui pour apprendre la valeur de l’objet : dois-je avoir peur du chien si Sarah en a peur, devrais-je être dégoûté par cette blague si Deborah l’est ? Et cet apprentissage peut être transgénérationnel – un canal de transmission et de perpétuation de valeurs culturelles. Par exemple, si un enfant grandit dans une famille qui adore le foot, dans une famille raciste, ou une famille très religieuse, l’enfant pourrait alors s’appuyer sur les sentiments des membres de sa famille à l’égard de ces « objets » pour apprendre comment apprécier le football, détester les étrangers ou adorer une certaine divinité. Mon argument est que parvenir à capter ce type d’information affective sur la valeur à accorder à certains objets dans notre environnement ne peut pas reposer uniquement sur la perception de l’expression faciale. Dans le chapitre 4 (pris de Reschke, Walle and Dukes, 2017), je mets en avant une autre manière dont cette approche de la reconnaissance des émotions peut accroître le pouvoir explicatif des émotions. Ayant précédemment montré que c’est le cas pour l’apprentissage social, l’attention est ici portée sur la cognition sociale. En abordant trois expériences classiques sur le développement de la cognition sociale, je démontre que le comportement des enfants ayant été décrit par les auteurs peut être mieux compris si l’on considère leur manière d’appréhender les relations entre la personne et l’objet, ainsi que ses buts. Par exemple, alors qu’il a été démontré que des enfants de 18 mois pouvaient agir d’une manière que l’on pourrait qualifier d’altruiste en aidant d’autres personnes à ouvrir la porte d’une armoire, il se pourrait qu’ils le fassent parce qu’ils ont compris que la personne était frustrée – particulièrement lorsque la personne cogne la porte de l’armoire de manière répétitive en tenant dans ses bras une pile de livres. Ayant défendu dans le premier chapitre que l’émotion de l’intérêt pourrait jouer un rôle particulièrement important dans notre manière d’apprendre par le biais des autres la valeur des objets de notre environnement, le chapitre 5 (pris de Dukes, Clément, Audrin and Mortillaro, 2017) prouve qu’il n’est possible pour les adultes de reconnaître l’intérêt chez les autres que lorsque l’intérêt est exprimé de manière dynamique (dans des films courts) ou, encore mieux, lorsque l’expression est montrée avec le corps présenté en entier. En d’autres termes, et cela confirme ce que l’on peut déjà trouver dans la littérature, une expression faciale statique de l’intérêt est très difficile à reconnaître sans l’apport d’autres indicateurs. Dans le chapitre 6, nous utilisons cette information pour tester comment l’expression de l’intérêt chez un adulte influence le comportement du jeune enfant. Alors que les enfants de 9 mois semblent indifférents à l’expression, les enfants de 12 mois avaient significativement plus tendance à choisir un objet qui avait précédemment été regardé avec intérêt plutôt que celui qui avait été regardé avec désintérêt. Étonnement, les enfants de 15 mois avaient significativement plus tendance à choisir l’objet qui avait été regardé avec désintérêt. La thèse se conclut en demandant jusqu’où une approche plus relationnelle de la reconnaissance des émotions peut aller et s’il est possible d’inclure d’autres types de relations sociales (par exemple, la compétition, la dominance, la coopération) pour créer une approche encore plus holistique.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Le développement de la confiance épistémique chez les jeunes enfants:: les enfants utilisent-ils le genre et l'âge de leurs sources informationnelles pour acquérir de nouvelles connaissances?
    Comment les jeunes enfants apprennent-ils d’autrui via le canal de la communication et comment contrôlent-ils les témoignages transmis par leur environnement social? Les recherches expérimentales de notre thèse de doctorat visent, d’une part, à mettre en évidence que, si le canal communicationnel constitue un moyen rapide et efficace d’augmenter leur stock de connaissances, les enfants sont pourtant peu enclins à considérer comme vraie une représentation qui leur est communiquée si celle-ci entre en conflit avec leur propre perception ou avec des connaissances préalablement stockées en mémoire. D’autre part, nos recherches empiriques ont l’originalité d’examiner le développement de la confiance épistémique sélective lorsque les enfants ne peuvent comparer l’information transmise avec leur propre background informationnel. Se basent-ils, dans ces conditions, sur des indices de nature sociale pour attribuer leur confiance? Si nos recherches empiriques se focalisent sur le développement de la confiance épistémique chez les enfants, un travail théorique propose en préambule une perspective intégrée de la confiance épistémique, avec l’hypothèse que différents types de mécanismes, tant de « bas niveau », suggérant un traitement quasi-automatique et très élémentaire de l’information, que de « haut niveau », soit plutôt réflexifs, participent aux prises de décisions fiduciaires. La confiance épistémique est ensuite discutée à la lumière du contexte de l’évolution de la communication, puis un état de l’art de la littérature spécialisée met en évidence comment et à quel moment les mécanismes de sélection des informations, définis en termes de mécanismes de vigilance épistémique, se développent chez les enfants. Notre partie empirique se destine à poursuivre ces travaux. Une première étude examine si l’âge de la source influence la confiance que va attribuer l’enfant pour acquérir une nouvelle information et dans quelle mesure cette attribution évolue entre l’âge de 2.5 et 5 ans. Un conflit entre l’indice de l’âge et de la fiabilité de la source est ensuite introduit, afin d’examiner si les préférences basées sur une même appartenance sociale sont robustes lorsque l’informateur similaire est étiqueté préalablement comme non fiable. Une deuxième étude examine ensuite l’influence de l'indice du genre, avec les mêmes questionnements sous‐jacents. Les résultats des deux études mettent en évidence que les enfants utilisent l’âge et le genre de la source lorsqu’ils ne disposent pas d’informations soulignant une différence de fiabilité entre celles-ci. Toutefois, ces indices ne sont pas utilisés systématiquement et leur utilisation diffère chez les enfants de 3, 4 ou 5 ans. En revanche, leurs résultats sont plus homogènes lorsqu’ils reçoivent des informations indiquant que la source à l’âge ou au genre similaire n’a pas eu d’accès informationnel. Dans ce cas, les enfants rejettent très clairement son témoignage autour de l’âge de 40 mois. Les enfants en-dessous de cet âge prennent également en compte l’accès informationnel des sources, mais de manière moins systématique. Nous proposons par conséquent certaines pistes développementales pour expliquer pourquoi les enfants les plus jeunes rencontrent encore des difficultés à sélectionner clairement la source fiable. Nous concluons ce travail en mettant en évidence comment les recherches conduites sur l’influence du genre et de l’âge d’une source informationnelle peuvent également générer des réflexions intéressantes pour les secteurs éducatifs et scolaires., How do young children acquire belief and knowledge from others’ testimony and how do they monitor and select fundamental pieces of information to learn about the world? The first aim of this experimental research is to emphasis that preschoolers, from an early age, are able to acquire various information by others, displaying skeptical trust in testimonies and selecting reliable epistemic informants. But despite its utility, this monitoring strategy has a major limitation because children cannot always access epistemic reliability of their sources in order to gauge their trustworthiness. Under these conditions, do children monitor specific social cues to acquire selectively new information? Thus, the second aim of this research is to examine if preschoolers use age and gender cues to selectively choose their informants. While this research specifically focuses on children development of selective trust in others testimony, a theoretical work suggests in introduction an integrated perspective of epistemic trust, suggesting that trust is underlined by both low and high cognitive processes, involving reflective judgment as well as tacit filtering device. Then, this work presents evidence to consider trust as a product of the human cognitive evolution and highlights the major milestones of selective trust development, defined as vigilance epistemic mechanisms. Afterwards the wide variety of cues young children use when evaluating testimony is reviewed. Our empirical work aims to follow up on the ongoing studies. In two studies, this research investigates how young preschoolers, from 2.5- to 5-year-olds, use a social cue (age for Study 1 and gender for Study 2) in the absence of other epistemic cue. Then, these studies combine a social cue with an epistemic cue (visual access) in order to examine if children social preference for similar sources weights more than their epistemic reliability. Both studies show that preschoolers use social cues as age and gender in the absence of other epistemic cues. However, both cues are not equally used by children and developmental differences were underlined. By contrast, results are more homogenous when an epistemic cue conflicts with a social cue. In fact, a key result is that preschoolers, as young as 40 months, are systematically able to give more weight to an epistemic cue than to a social cue when evaluating testimony. However, some children under 40 months did not clearly favor the epistemic cue, although they took it into account. We suggest some cognitive developmental issues to explain why they are sometimes unable to adequately select the testimony of the reliable informant. Finally, we connect the results of the studies with educational and scholar practical fields.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Socialization: interactions between parents and children in everyday family life
    (2012)
    Keel, Sara
    ;
    ;
    Mondada, Lorenza
    This thesis is part of an interdisciplinary research project on the socialization of preschoolers. By adopting a Conversation Analytic (CA) approach informed by Ethnomethodology (EM), it offers a study of the socialization process as it takes place within everyday parent-child interactions. Based on a large audio-visual corpus featuring footage of eight French-speaking families filmed extensively in their homes, the study focuses on recorded examples of young children initiating interactive sequences by producing evaluative turns, such as “that’s beautiful”, “(I) like that”, and “yuck”. By taking into account the interactants’ articulation of embodied resources – talk, gaze, and gesture – the study aims, on the one hand, to describe how young children manage to produce evaluative turns that make a response by the addressed parent relevant; and to evidence how, through their participation in everyday interaction, young children acquire communicative skills and a sense of themselves as effective social actors. On the other hand, it seeks to examine parents’ most frequent responses – agreements, disagreements, or questioning repeats – and to look at the implications of these responses for the further course of action. Looking at how children’s evaluative actions – as attempts to communicate their normative position, and their affective implication with respect to the surrounding world – are treated in turn by the parents, reveals the parents’ emic understanding of their children’s participation in evaluating the world they commonly inhabit. Finally, the study of interactively produced evaluative sequences also allows some new light to be shed on the ways in which parents and children achieve shared understanding, and how they deal with delicate issues of alignment/disalignment, as well as with matters related to their respective membership categories.
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    L'esprit des sociétés. Bilan et perspectives en sociologie cognitive
    (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2011)
    Kaufmann, Laurence
    ;
    ; ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    Ouvertures. Vers une sociologie cognitive "intégrative"
    (Paris: Editions de la Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2011) ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence
    ;
    ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence
  • Publication
    Accès libre
    La sociologie cognitive
    (Paris: Orphys/Maison des Sciences de l'Homme, 2010) ;
    Kaufmann, Laurence