The engagement of participants varies a lot during a conversation, with direct consequences on the quality and the success of the interaction. How is this engagement implemented? We propose a new model of engagement based on a multimodal description encompassing as many cues as possible from prosody, gestures, facial expressions, lexicon, and syntax. We used […]
Does modifying visual feedback facilitate learning to write new pseudo-letters?
Learning to write relies on the efficient integration of visual and proprioceptive feedback. Learners become expert writers when they transition from a control anchored on the visualization of the ongoing written trace to the motor control of handwriting movement. We tested whether this transition was facilitated by deleting part of the written trace and of […]
Multilevel Linguistic Features Constrain Speech Comprehension
Humans are experts at processing speech, but how this feat is accomplished remains a major open question. We investigated how speech comprehension is determined by seven different linguistic features, ranging from acoustic modulation rate to contextual lexical information. All these features independently impact the comprehension of accelerated speech, with a clear dominance of […]
Communicative Feedback in Language Acquisition
Children communicate and use language in social interactions from a very young age. They experiment with their developing linguistic knowledge and receive valuable feedback from their interlocutors. We formalize a mechanism for language acquisition, whereby children can improve their linguistic knowledge in conversation by leveraging explicit or implicit signals of communication success or failure. […]
Laughter in interaction
Mazzocconi, C., Ginzburg, J. A Longitudinal Characterization of Typical Laughter Development in Mother–Child Interaction from 12 to 36 Months: Formal Features and Reciprocal Responsiveness. J Nonverbal Behav (2022).
Conceptual alignment in a joint picture-naming task performed with a social robot
To “align” during a conversation means for interlocutors to achieve similar mental representations of the communicative situation. Can conceptual alignement occur when one of the interlocutors is a robot? Twenty-four French native speakers took turns with a robot in naming images of objects belonging to different semantic categories. For a subset of those semantic categories, […]
MIA: An open-source toolbox for Multi-patient Intracranial EEG Analysis
Intracranial EEG (iEEG) performed during the pre-surgical evaluation of refractory epilepsy provides a great opportunity to investigate the neurophysiology of human cognitive functions with exceptional spatial and temporal precisions. A difficulty of the iEEG approach for cognitive neuroscience, however, is the potential variability across patients in the anatomical location of implantations and in the functional […]
Connectivity of the left-ventral occipitotemporal cortex during visual word processing
The left-ventral occipito-temporal cortex (aka the Visual Word Form Area) plays a key role in reading. We used a combination of EEG and TMS (panel A) to assess the propagation of neural activity from that region to the rest of the brain. Cross-hemispheric neural propagation from the left to the right hemisphere was reduced when […]
Chunking mechanisms are central to the acquisition of sequences
Baboons are invited to learn sequences by pointing to a red target circle appearing on a touch screen (Panels A and B). Once the target is touched, it moves to a different position. Baboons repeatedly produce the same sequence of 9 touches for 1000 trials, which are then analyzed as 10 consecutive blocks of 100 […]