Effet de l'intensité sur la catégorisation des prototypes émotionnels faciaux chez l'enfant et l'adulte

This study examines whether the intensity of facial emotional prototypes influences the process of their categorization in children and young adults. Two facial prototypes, one of happiness and one of disgust, including action units of three different intensities, were shown to 30 children and 30 adults who were submitted to a categorization task. As predicted, categorization accuracy was found to increase, in general, as a function of the intensity of action units. Adults were better than children but only for the categorization of disgust when the action unit intensity was weak. The happiness prototype was better categorized than the disgust prototype, and two types of errors were clearly more frequent than the others in the categorization of the disgust prototype: disgust/anger and disgust/sadness. The results are discussed in relation to the regulative processes involved in the socialization of emotion.     

Does a prototypical argumentative schema exist? Text recall in 8 to 13 years olds

120 students in grades 3 to 7 (aged 8 to 13) heard an argumentative text and were immediately submitted to a free recall task. The results show that before grade 7, the subjects did not view the text as argumentative. The discussion centers on the relevancy of a prototypical argumentative schema in accounting for these findings.     

Conflits et stratégies suscités par l'innovation

L'auteur examine les raisons des résistances induites par le changement technique en insistant sur la dévalorisation du statut des personnes touchées. Puis il présente la tentative de formalisation des organisations par l'informatique centralisée avant de montrer que l'acceptation de l'innovation passe par une négociation ménageant les objectifs défendus par les utilisateurs. Mais l'exécutant peut aussi s'approprier la technique et l'exploiter pour développer une stratégie de pouvoir. Des exemples sont pris dans des domaines variés: industrie, enseignement, administration, politique, agriculture, secteur médical.
This article examines the reasons of resistances caused by technical change with a special emphasis on status devaluation of persons concerned. The author continues with a discussion of management's attempt to control the work process in introducing centralized computer-based information systems, before arguing that innovation acceptance calls for a negotiation saving user's aims. But workers can also appropriate the technology and exploit it to develop a power strategy. Examples are chosen in a variety of sectors: industry, teaching, administration, politics, agriculture, medicine.     

Languages on the screen: Is film comprehension related to the viewers’ fluency level and to the language in the subtitles?

This research aimed at studying the role of subtitling in film comprehension. It focused on the languages in which the subtitles are written and on the participants' fluency levels in the languages presented in the film. In a preliminary part of the study, the most salient visual and dialogue elements of a short sequence of an English film were extracted by the means of a free recall task after showing two versions of the film (first a silent, then a dubbed-into-French version) to native French speakers. This visual and dialogue information was used in the setting of a questionnaire concerning the understanding of the film presented in the main part of the study, in which other French native speakers with beginner, intermediate, or advanced fluency levels in English were shown one of three versions of the film used in the preliminary part. Respectively, these versions had no subtitles or they included either English or French subtitles. The results indicate a global interaction between all three factors in this study: For the beginners, visual processing dropped from the version without subtitles to that with English subtitles, and even more so if French subtitles were provided, whereas the effect of film version on dialogue comprehension was the reverse. The advanced participants achieved higher comprehension for both types of information with the version without subtitles, and dialogue information processing was always better than visual information processing. The intermediate group similarly processed dialogues in a better way than visual information, but was not affected by film version. These results imply that, depending on the viewers' fluency levels, the language of subtitles can have different effects on movie information processing.     

On the status of location in visual attention

The authors propose a distinction between four issues underlying the debate on the status of location in visual selective attention. Three of them concern the representation within which attention operates. The grouping question focuses on whether or not this representation segments the visual field into perceptual groups. The space-invariance question focuses on whether it describes objects in spatio-topic or in space-invariant coordinates. Finally, the feature-coding question concerns whether or not it contains information about objects' non-spatial features. The last issue focuses on whether or not attention can be guided preattentively towards items possessing certain pre-specified physical properties other than location, and is referred to as the attentional-guidance question. A critical survey of the literature within the proposed framework is presented. Based on its conclusions, the status of location in current research is outlined, and avenues for further research are suggested.     

Scene congruency biases Binocular Rivalry

Contextual regularities, that is, objects’ tendency to appear with certain other objects, facilitate the processing of visual scenes and confer contextually incongruent objects with a special attentional status. This study was aimed at investigating the mechanisms underlying this attentional advantage using Binocular Rivalry (BR). In two experiments, congruent and incongruent images (e.g., a man drinking from a glass vs. a man “drinking” from a hairbrush) were pitted against each other, yielding a version of BR in which two objects rival within a given scene. Incongruent objects predominated in awareness longer than congruent ones. This effect stemmed from the fact that their dominance epochs lasted longer on the average than those of congruent objects, suggesting a difficulty to disengage attention from such objects. On the other hand, no support was found for the notion that incongruent objects also attract attention.     

Nature and nurture in own-race face processing

A standard visual preference task was used to examine 3-month-olds' looking times at own-race versus other-race faces as a function of environmental exposure to faces from the two categories. Participants were Caucasian infants living in a Caucasian environment, African infants living in an African environment, and African infants living in a predominantly Caucasian environment. The results indicate that preference for own-race faces is present as early as 3 months of age, but that this preference results from exposure to the prototypical facial environment.