Request solicitation and semantic evocation of freedom: an evaluation in a computer-mediated communication context

The "But you are free of..." technique is a compliance procedure which solicits someone to comply with a request by simply telling him that he is free to accept or to refuse the request. This semantic evocation leads to increased compliance with the request. A new evaluation of the generality of this technique was tested in an experiment in which subjects received an anonymous electronic mail which asked them to consult the site of a humanitarian association for children. Analysis showed that, when the semantic evocation of freedom is included in the message, a higher compliance rate was observed than in a situation in which this evocation was omitted.     

Evidence for two pitch encoding mechanisms using a selective auditory training paradigm

The neural mechanisms underlying the perception of pitch, a sensory attribute of paramount importance in hearing, have been a matter of debate for over a century. A question currently at the heart of the debate is whether the pitch of all harmonic complex tones can be determined by the auditory system's using a single mechanism, or whether two different neural mechanisms are involved, depending on the stimulus conditions. When the harmonics are widely spaced, as is the case at high fundamental frequencies (FOs), and/or when the frequencies of the harmonics are low, the frequency components of the sound fall in different peripheral auditory channels and are then "resolved" by the peripheral auditory system. In contrast, at low F0s, or when the harmonics are high in frequency, several harmonics interact within the passbands of the same auditory filters, being thus "unresolved" by the peripheral auditory system. The idea that more than one mechanism mediates the encoding of pitch depending on the resolvability status of the harmonics was investigated here by testing for transfer of learning in F0 discrimination between different stimulus conditions involving either resolved or unresolved harmonics after specific training in one of these conditions. The results, which show some resolvability-specificity of F0-discrimination learning, support the hypothesis that two different underlying mechanisms mediate the encoding of the F0 of resolved and unresolved harmonics.     

A study of mood changes and personality during a 31-day period of chronic hypoxia in a hypobaric chamber (Everest-Comex 97)

High altitudes of more than 3,000 meters produce physiological disorders and adverse changes in mood states. In the present study, we report analyses of mood states and personality traits in eight experienced climbers participating in a 31-day period of confinement in hypobaric chamber and gradual decompression from sea level to 8,848 m (Experiment 'Everest-Comex 97'). The subjects were tested at 5,500 m and 6,500 m on Day 13, 5,000 m and 6,500 m on Day 24, and 8,000 m and 8,848 m altitude on Days 27 and 31. Adverse changes in mood states, such as Vigor and Fatigue, occurred at 8,000 m and 8,848 m, which were significantly correlated with cerebral altitude symptomatology. In addition, a significant negative correlation was found between Fatigue and Factor C, which is a personality measure of emotional stability. We suggest that individuals with low emotional stability could be more sensitive to environmental stressors than more emotionally stable subjects who face reality.     

Being the agent: memory for action events

Whoever paid the bill at the restaurant last night, will clearly remember doing it. Independently from the type of action, it is a common experience that being the agent provides a special strength to our memories. Even if it is generally agreed that personal memories (episodic memory) rely on separate neural substrates with respect to general knowledge (semantic memory), little is known on the nature of the link between memory and the sense of agency. In the present paper, we review results from two experiments investigating the effects of agency on both explicit and implicit memory traces. Performance of normal subjects is compared to that of schizophrenic patients in order to explore the role of awareness of action on memory. It is proposed that reliable first-person information is necessary to create a stable and coherent motor memory trace.     

Lexical competition and the acquisition of novel words

Three experiments examined the involvement of newly learnt words in lexical competition. Adult participants were familiarized with novel nonsense sequences that overlapped strongly with existing words (e.g. cathedruke, derived from cathedral) through repeated presentation in a phoneme-monitoring task. Experiment 1 looked at the immediate effects of exposure to these sequences, with participants showing familiarity with the form of the novel sequences in a two-alternative forced choice task. The effect of this exposure on lexical competition was examined by presenting the existing words (e.g. cathedral) in a lexical decision task. The immediate effect of the exposure was facilitatory, suggesting that the novel words had activated the representation of the closest real word rather than developing their own lexical representations. In Experiment 2, inhibitory lexical competition effects emerged over the course of 5 days for offset-diverging (e.g. cathedruke-cathedral) but not onset-diverging (e.g. yothedral-cathedral) novel words. Experiment 3 disentangled the roles of time and level-of-exposure in the lexicalization process and assessed the generality of the observed lexical inhibition using pause detection. A single, concentrated exposure session was used, which resulted in good recognition performance soon after. Lexicalization effects were absent immediately after exposure but emerged 1 week later, despite no intervening exposure to the novel items. These results suggest that integrating a novel word into the mental lexicon can be an extended process: phonological information is learnt swiftly, but full integration with existing items develops at a slower rate.     

When being included is being excluded: A note on complement set focus and the inclusion relation

Some negative quantifiers lead to pronominal reference patterns that are different from those obtained with positive quantifiers (Moxey & Sanford, 1993). This has been interpreted as meaning that the negatives give rise to a focus on the complement set (Moxey & Sanford, 1987); so, given few of the children enjoyed the trip, focus is on those who did not enjoy the trip. To date, this interpretation has depended on subjective judgments as to which set an anaphoric plural pronoun is referring to, allowing other interpretations of the data to be given by discourse semanticists. In two studies, we use the attachment patterns associated with the expression including, thereby circumventing the judgment problem. We show that a case like not many people enjoyed the race, including John leads to a representation in which John maps into the set of individuals who did not enjoy the race. We test and support the earlier claim that complement set focus is driven by denials associated with some negative quantifiers.     

La Direction des affaires juridiques et des droits des patients de l’AP–HP et la première vague de la pandémie Covid-19

To facilitate the analysis and the management of claims related to the last Covid-19 pandemic, the DAJ of the AP–HP constituted a medical group assisted by lawyers intending to review the scientific knowledge and organizational measures during the first wave of this pandemic. This group brought together medical doctors with both scientific expertise in the main specialties requested during this viral infection and knowledge of repairing bodily damage. Based on the data provided by the hospital dashboards and the collection of hospital procedures for Covid-19 and non-Covid-19 patients, the goal of this group was to assess the level of scientific knowledge and organizational measures respectively at the start of the epidemic, its peak and at the end. During the three periods of this pandemic the main changes observed included a greater selectivity on admissions with increasing consideration on the patient's comorbidity; a continual evolution in drug management and more rigorous isolation measures with interruption of visiting rights. The target was to prevent contamination of the non-infected persons with an obsession to protect healthcare workers. The absence of selection for patients requiring intensive care for compensation of their respiratory failure forced AP–HP to double the number of intensive care beds and to refer some patients in other regions. In a context of unstable scientific knowledge and evolving organizational measures, the collection of these data should facilitate the management of claims related to Covid19 during the first wave of this pandemic and open a prospective study for the next pandemic.     

The Content and Logic of Imperatives

Axiomathes - This paper articulates an account of imperatives that sensibly supports the idea of a logic of imperative inferences. We rebuke common objections to the very possibility of such a...     

Amount of Learning and Signal Stability Modulate Emergence of Structure and Iconicity in Novel Signaling Systems

Iterated language learning experiments that explore the emergence of linguistic structure in the laboratory vary considerably in methodological implementation, limiting the generalizability of findings. Most studies also restrict themselves to exploring the emergence of combinatorial and compositional structure in isolation. Here, we use a novel signal space comprising binary auditory and visual sequences and manipulate the amount of learning and temporal stability of these signals. Participants had to learn signals for meanings differing in size, shape, and brightness; their productions in the test phase were transmitted to the next participant. Across transmission chains of 10 generations each, Experiment 1 varied how much learning of auditory signals took place, and Experiment 2 varied temporal stability of visual signals. We found that combinatorial structure emerged only for auditory signals, and iconicity emerged when the amount of learning was reduced, as an opportunity for rote-memorization hampers the exploration of the iconic affordances of the signal space. In addition, compositionality followed an inverted u-shaped trajectory raising across several generations before declining again toward the end of the transmission chains. This suggests that detection of systematic form-meaning linkages requires stable combinatorial units that can guide learners toward the structural properties of signals, but these combinatorial units had not yet emerged in these unfamiliar systems. Our findings underscore the importance of systematically manipulating training conditions and signal characteristics in iterated language learning experiments to study the interactions between the emergence of iconicity, combinatorial and compositional structure in novel signaling systems.