Normal and pathological development of social cognition

Funding

Participants

Agence Nationale de la RechercheBaudouin Forgeot d'Arc, Paul Roux, Miriam Maugis, Sanaa Moukawane, and several Master students.
Collaborators from Socodev project (Emmanuel Dupoux, Pierre Jacob...) External collaborators at Hôpital Robert Debré (Richard Delorme...) and CHU Versailles (Christine Passerieux).

Humans have unique abilities to help, communicate, and cooperate with their conspecifics. Correlatively they also have a high propensity to cheat, defect and harm their conspecifics. The study of the biological and psychological bases of these social abilities and of their cultural variability is one of the most exciting new frontiers lying at the boundary between the social and the biological sciences. It is also highly relevant to several societal issues which implicate social behaviors (social pathologies, group identity, prejudice, governance, ethics, etc.). Together with Emmanuel Dupoux and Pierre Jacob, we have obtained funding from ANR for a large scale project (Socodev) on various aspects of the development of social cognitive skills.

Within my team, we explore how various cognitive states are extracted intuitively from simple visual scenes, and how these representations are used to draw inferences. We mainly explore three types of representations: 

  1. the representation of animacy, i.e. the difference between inanimate objects and self-propelled animate agents
  2. the representation of agents' goals in actions
  3. the representation of agents’ beliefs.

Our general approach is to use nonverbal stimuli and to contrast explicit verbal tasks with more implicit nonverbal measures such as eye fixations patterns, that are modulated by subjects’ expectations with respect to a social scene. We study these abilities in adults, their development in children, and their pathologies in autism (B. Forgeot d'Arc and collaborators) and in schizophrenia (P. Roux and collaborators).

This work was pioneered by Baudouin Forgeot d'Arc in his PhD work on the attribution of beliefs. More can be learnt about this on his website. See the animations he designed.

Forgeot d'Arc, B., & Ramus, F. (2011). Belief attribution despite verbal interference. Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, 64(5), 975-990. preprint