Laboratoire Cognition, Langues, Langage, Ergonomie

Social robots are increasingly integrated into early childhood education, yet limited research exists examining preschoolers’ learning from robotic versus human demonstrators across embodied tasks. This study investigated whether children (aged between 3 and 6) demonstrate comparable performance when learning body-centered tasks from a humanoid robot compared to a human demonstrator. Sixty-two typically developing children were randomly assigned to a robot or a human condition. Participants completed three tasks: body part comprehension and production, body movement imitation, and emotion recognition from body postures. Performance was measured using standardized protocols. No significant main effects of demonstrator type emerged across most tasks. However, age significantly predicted performance across all measures, with systematic improvements between 3 and 6. A significant age × demonstrator interaction was observed for sequential motor imitation, with stronger age effects for the human demonstrator condition. Preschool children demonstrate comparable performance when interacting with a humanoid robot versus a human in body-centered tasks, though motor imitation shows differential developmental trajectories. These findings suggest appropriately designed social robots may serve as supplementary pedagogical tools for embodied learning in early childhood education under specific conditions. The primacy of developmental effects highlights the importance of age-appropriate design in both traditional and technology-enhanced educational contexts.

The illusion of control (IoC) is a cognitive distortion implicated in risky and problem gambling. This study aimed to validate a comprehensive IoC measure, the Multi-Dimensional Rating Scale for Illusion of Control in Gambling (EEMDIC), in a large non-clinical sample of adult and aging gamblers, and to clarify how IoC relates to gambling severity, game type, and age. A total of 1,311 participants aged 40-75 completed the EEMDIC, the Problem Gambling Severity Index (PGSI), and questions on gambling habits and sociodemographics. Exploratory (n = 649) and confirmatory (n = 662) factor analyses assessed scale structure. ANOVAs, linear regressions, Mann-Whitney U tests, and Spearman correlations examined associations with game category, PGSI scores, education, occupation, and age. Factor analyses supported a reduced 14-item EEMDIC with four coherent factors: Luck, Skill, Strategy, and Rituals/Superstitious Behaviors. Higher EEMDIC scores, especially on primary-control dimensions (Skill, Strategy), were associated with greater gambling severity and engagement in strategic betting (sports, horse racing). Education correlated negatively with IoC, and occupational differences emerged. Age was modestly but significantly associated with lower IoC: it explained ≈ 2.8% of total variance and 0.9-4.1% across factors. Framing on gains or losses showed no age effect after controlling for PGSI. The EEMDIC is a reliable, multidimensional tool distinguishing primary and secondary control beliefs. Findings link primary-control beliefs to gambling harm and show modest age-related declines in IoC. The scale can inform targeted prevention and tailored interventions across game types and sociodemographic groups.

This study proposes a qualitative analysis of self replies in Wikipedia talk pages, more precisely when the first two messages of a discussion are written by the same user. This specific pattern occurs in more than 10% of threads with two messages or more and can be explained by a number of reasons. After a first examination of the lexical specificities of second messages, we propose a seven categories typology and use it to annotate two reference samples (English and French) of 100 threads each. Finally, we analyse and compare the performance of human annotators (who reach a reasonable global efficiency) and instruction-tuned LLMs (which encounter important difficulties with several categories).

Primates, the most colorful mammalian radiation, have previously served as an interesting model to test the functions and evolutionary drivers of variation in eye color. We assess the contribution of photo-regulatory and communicative functions to the external eye appearance of nine macaque species representing all the branches of their radiation. Macaques’ well described social structure and wide geographical distribution make them interesting to explore. We find that (1) the posterior option of the anterior eyeball is more pigmented closer to the equator, suggesting photoprotective functions. We also find that (2) the temporal side of the eyeball is more heavily pigmented than the nasal side. This suggests that eyeball pigmentation in macaques is distributed to reduce damage to the corneal limbus. The inclusion of a translocated population of M. fuscata in our analyses also suggests that external eye appearance may change quickly, perhaps owing to phenotypic plasticity. We find no evidence that communicative functions drive variation in external eye appearance in macaques. These results suggest that the amount of light in a species’ environment drives variation in eye coloration across macaque species. Furthermore, the geographical distribution of macaques hints at important factors that have yet to be accounted for, such as the reflectivity of the terrain a given species inhabits.

Neurofeedback techniques provide participants immediate feedback on neuronal signals, enabling them to modulate their brain activity. This technique holds promise to unveil brain-behavior relationship and offers opportunities for neuroenhancement. Establishing causal relationships between modulated brain activity and behavioral improvements requires rigorous experimental designs, including appropriate control groups and large samples. Our primary objective was to examine whether a single neurofeedback session, designed to enhance working memory through the modulation of theta or high-alpha frequencies, elicits specific changes in electrophysiological and cognitive outcomes. Additionally, we explored predictors of successful neuromodulation. A total of 101 healthy adults were assigned to groups trained to increase frontal theta, parietal high alpha, or random frequencies (active control group). We measured resting-state EEG, working memory performance, and self-reported psychological states before and after one neurofeedback session. Although our analyses revealed improvements in electrophysiological and behavioral outcomes, these gains were not specific to the experimental groups. An increase in the frequency targeted by the training has been observed for the theta and high alpha groups, but training designed to increase randomly selected frequencies appears to induce more generalized neuromodulation compared with targeting a specific frequency. Among all the predictors of neuromodulation examined, resting theta and high alpha amplitudes predicted specifically the increase of those frequencies during the training. These results highlight the challenge of integrating a control group based on enhancing randomly selected frequency bands and suggest potential avenues for optimizing interventions (e.g., by including a control group trained in both up- and down-regulation).

Theories of justice suggest that it serves two main purposes: punishment and restoration. Although punishment emerges early and has been well-documented, little is known about the contexts in which young children engage in restorative practices like compensation for victims. The current study investigated whether children’s engagement in compensation and punishment (which often involve a redistribution of resources) was sensitive to characteristics of the perpetrator and victim known to shape distributive justice decisions (decisions about how resources should be distributed), such as social dominance, resource inequality, and moral character. A total of 54 children aged 3 to 7 years completed a series of moral judgment experiments. Each experiment featured interactions between a perpetrator and a victim, ending with the perpetrator stealing the victim’s toy. In Experiment 1 (N = 44), social dominance did not affect punishment or compensation overall, but older children compensated the dominant victim (but not the subordinate victim) less than younger children. In Experiment 2 (N = 42), children compensated the poor victim more than the rich victim, but they did not punish the rich perpetrator more than the poor perpetrator. In Experiment 3 (N = 45), children compensated the victim with a good moral character more than the victim with a bad moral character, and the victim’s moral character did not influence punishment. Altogether, these findings offer new insights into how children resort to compensation for victims as a complement to, rather than an alternative to, punishment.

Describing the dynamical nature of happiness is crucial for understanding why individuals are constantly running on a hedonic treadmill around set levels of well-being. Based on the self-centeredness branch of the ’self-centeredness/selflessness happiness model’, we present a dynamical model that focuses on unfolding the hedonic dimension of happiness dynamics through the use of the approach–avoidance framework. This numerical model enables us to understand and analyze emerging hedonic cycles caused by hedonic motivation and hedonic adaptation. In particular, hedonic motivation leads people to experience hedonic activities, which result in successes or failures and experiences of pleasure and afflictive affects; whereas hedonic adaptation causes individuals to return to a baseline level of pleasure and afflictive affects, more quickly for the former than the latter. The proposed dynamical model is based on the approach–avoidance framework that considers human behavior in two separate regulatory processes that contribute to homeostasis of individuals’ happiness. We analyze these two processes independently and conjointly in order to highlight their effect on happiness levels. The analysis shows how individual characteristics and their combination may result in hedonic cycles, afflictive affects, (dis-)pleasure, and particular happiness dynamics. We also discuss how such a numerical model enables us to perform a multifactorial analysis which is hardly feasible outside the context of a simulation and how it may help us to narrow and design relevant experimental surveys from these preliminary numerical results.