Systèmes de personnalité au niveau de l'individu : vers une évaluation de l'architecture sociocognitive de la personnalité

This paper addresses conceptual strategies in the assessment of intra-individual personality architecture, including the assessment of those social-cognitive structures and dynamics that contribute to personality coherence. The paper also relates social-cognitive analyses of intra-individual personality architecture to trait-theoretic analyses of inter-individual differences in the population. An overarching theme is that these alternative research traditions should be understood as approaches to different scientific problems. Unlike, for example, the lexical Big Five tradition of personality research, social-cognitive theories are concerned fundamentally with mental structures and dynamics that causally contribute to personality functioning and coherence, and with understanding how these cognitive and affective systems develop and function in interaction with the social environment. As has been explained by Lamiell (2003) and others, inter-individual analyses cannot substitute for the study of intra-individual personality dynamics and dispositions.     

Modélisation pour un environnement multimédia de l'apprentissage individualisé de la lecture

The aim of our research project is to study what contribution the new technologies can bring to teaching and learning. So, we have chosen a pluridiciplinary approach, combining the exploration of computer potentialities with the integration of research studies about the learning application. The application is a tutor module of AMICAL project (Architecture Multi-agent Interactive Compagnon pour l'Apprentissage de la Lecture). The issue is to determine and to explain the knowledge at work in a teaching process. To begin with, we shall explain the different decision-making processes, which characterize the teaching act. In a second part, we shall describe the processes of knowledge determination and modelling.     

Physiological activity in an attribute learning task.

The relationship between the amount of information processing in an Attribute Learning task and autonomic activity, measured by skin conductance response (SCR), was investigated. The amount of information processing was manipulated by type of concept and feedback. Furthermore, the influence of practice and verbalization was studied.Three types of concepts were used: conjunction, exclusion and joint denial. The stimulus population consisted of four three-valued dimensions. The results showed that (1) SCR did not differ among concepts; (2) SCR varied with type of feedback, it being smallest at blanks and largest at infirming feedback; (3) SCR was related to the number of confirmations preceding infirmation; (4) subjects mainly used the strategy ‘reject hypothesis only after infirmation’; (5) subjects usually selected not-yet-tested hypotheses; (6) practice influenced performance; (7) verbalization did not result in more efficient use of information; however, the appropriateness of the experimental set-up to study this factor was questioned; (8) conjunction was easier to learn than the other concepts. The results were discussed in terms of uncertainty reduction, resulting from testing hypotheses in a concept learning task.     

Sentence understanding and knowledge of the world: Evidences from a sentence-picture matching task performed by aphasic patients

The abilities of aphasic patients to perform a sentence-picture matching task were investigated on simple declarative reversible sentences. Two factors were found to differentially affect Broca's versus Wernicke's aphasics' performance: sentence plausibility and spatial arrangement. Sentence plausibility, that is to say, the liability of two given nouns in a sentence to act as agent and recipient according to normal subjects' expectancies, had a significant effect on the frequency of correct responses of Broca's aphasics but not on those of Wernicke's. Conversely, the latter were found to be more sensitive to a match or mismatch in the left-to-right spatial arrangement of the grammatical subject and object in a sentence on the one hand, and the order of the corresponding personages in the picture on the other. The results are discussed in terms of “frame selection” and the handling of ordered structure strategies contributing to normal system, but selectively disturbed in the case of brain damage.