Introduction George Loewenstein, Daniel Read, and Roy F. Baumeister P _L sychology and economics have a classic love-hate relationship. ...

Sequential action makes up the bulk of human daily activity, and yet much remains unknown about how people learn such actions. In one motor learning paradigm, the serial reaction time (SRT) task, people are taught a consistent sequence of button presses by cueing them with the next target response. However, the SRT task only records keypress response times to a cued target, and thus it cannot reveal the full time‐course of motion, including predictive movements. This paper describes a mouse movement (...) trajectory SRT task in which the cursor must be moved to a cued location. We replicated keypress SRT results, but also found that predictive movement—before the next cue appears—increased during the experiment. Moreover, trajectory analyses revealed that people developed a centering strategy under uncertainty. In a second experiment, we made prediction explicit, no longer cueing targets. Thus, participants had to explore the response alternatives and learn via reinforcement, receiving rewards and penalties for correct and incorrect actions, respectively. Participants were not told whether the sequence of stimuli was deterministic, nor if it would repeat, nor how long it was. Given the difficulty of the task, it is unsurprising that some learners performed poorly. However, many learners performed remarkably well, and some acquired the full 10‐item sequence within 10 repetitions. Comparing the high‐ and low‐performers’ detailed results in this reinforcement learning (RL) task with the first experiment's cued trajectory SRT task, we found similarities between the two tasks, suggesting that the effects in Experiment 1 are due to predictive, rather than reactive processes. Finally, we found that two standard model‐free reinforcement learning models fit the high‐performing participants, while the four low‐performing participants provide better fit with a simple negative recency bias model. (shrink)

The thirteen original essays in this book examine the status and development of the sciences in the eighteenth century. The last generation has seen a revolution in the methodology adopted by historians of science: The development of science is no longer described as a steady progress towards truth - certainties have given way to questions. The essays in this volume scrutinize these changing perspectives in historiography and recommend paths for future study. The eighteenth century has been a neglected and much-misunderstood (...) era in the development of science, all too often viewed as something of a trough between the towering achievements of the 'Scientific Revolution' and the nineteenth century. Yet it was a period of notable developments; it saw the establishment of such fields as electricity and heat, the 'chemical revolution', the new science of gases, the isolation of oxygen, the nebular hypothesis in cosmology, the foundation of rational mechanics, and the birth pangs of biology, geology and psychology. It was, indeed, an age when knowledge was in ferment. (shrink)

En opposant comme deux substances irréductibles l’âme et le corps, Descartes n’explique pas l’unité qui est en l’homme. En décrivant l’effort comme une réalité intermédiaire entre le corps et l’âme, Maine de Biran ressaisit l’individualité même. Devant le mystère humain, il faut donc invoquer l’expérience biranienne et non la métaphysique cartésienne : il convient d’appréhender, avant toute analyse, l’unité d’un élan, qui se disperse peut-être, mais garde sa souplesse.

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 2, Page 311-326, April 2022.

La derni re dition des Lettres sur les animaux, ouvrage de l'encyclop diste mineur Charles-George Le Roy, date de 1896. Cette nouvelle dition propose une pr sentation tr s respecteuse de la pens e originale de l'auteur, elle pr cise dans quelles circonstances les divers l ments du livre furent successivement publi s et retrace son volution depuis les articles HOMME (Morale) et INSTINCT de l'Encyclop die jusqu' l' dition compl te de 1802. L'introduction situe les Lettresdans l'uvre de (...) Le Roy qui, comptant l' criture parmi ses activit s, fut d'autant plus m l aux conflits d'id es de l' poque. Des documents in dits permettent d' tablir avec exactitude combien Le Roy a su mettre profit ses fonctions de lieutenant des chasses des Parcs de Versailles pour exercer ses talents d'auteur. A la lumi re de divers autres documents, et parmi eux des in dits, il appara t que Le Roy fr quentait quelques-uns des penseurs les plus connus de l' poque (Condillac, Buffon, Diderot, Helv tius, d'Holbach), ainsi que des personnalit s de la haute soci t (en particulier Mme de Marchais), deux mondes don't l'influence est perceptible dans les Lettres sur les animaux. Celles-ci font cho non seulement aux crivains que leur auteur connaissit personnellement, mais aussi aux nombreux autres qu'il avait lus, notamment Montesquieu, Voltaire, Rousseau. Inspir et nourri de ces contacts scientifiques, litt raires et philosophiques, Le Roy a su s'en d gager pour d velopper sa propre pens e et, l'image de l'excellent accueil que les contemporains et la post rit ont r serv l'ouvrage, ses id es ne peuvent qu' veiller un vif int r t. (shrink)

Sequential action makes up the bulk of human daily activity, and yet much remains unknown about how people learn such actions. In one motor learning paradigm, the serial reaction time (SRT) task, people are taught a consistent sequence of button presses by cueing them with the next target response. However, the SRT task only records keypress response times to a cued target, and thus it cannot reveal the full time‐course of motion, including predictive movements. This paper describes a mouse movement (...) trajectory SRT task in which the cursor must be moved to a cued location. We replicated keypress SRT results, but also found that predictive movement—before the next cue appears—increased during the experiment. Moreover, trajectory analyses revealed that people developed a centering strategy under uncertainty. In a second experiment, we made prediction explicit, no longer cueing targets. Thus, participants had to explore the response alternatives and learn via reinforcement, receiving rewards and penalties for correct and incorrect actions, respectively. Participants were not told whether the sequence of stimuli was deterministic, nor if it would repeat, nor how long it was. Given the difficulty of the task, it is unsurprising that some learners performed poorly. However, many learners performed remarkably well, and some acquired the full 10‐item sequence within 10 repetitions. Comparing the high‐ and low‐performers’ detailed results in this reinforcement learning (RL) task with the first experiment's cued trajectory SRT task, we found similarities between the two tasks, suggesting that the effects in Experiment 1 are due to predictive, rather than reactive processes. Finally, we found that two standard model‐free reinforcement learning models fit the high‐performing participants, while the four low‐performing participants provide better fit with a simple negative recency bias model. (shrink)

An instructive comparison can be drawn between Jacques Ellul’s 1936 Esprit article portraying “Fascism as Liberalism’s Child” and Georges Bataille’s 1938 lecture on “The Sacred Sociology of Today’s World”. Both rely on Durkheim’s sociology in assuming modernity’s amorphousness, leaving passive masses of atomized individuals susceptible to mobilization into totalized entities by charismatic leadership. Bataille welcomes the postwar intensification of social aggregates but criticizes their militant, militaristic regimentation as not violent and sacred enough, whereas for Ellul, the resurgent social sacred (whether (...) orgiastic or dictatorial), as the active mass, is the enemy of the free person as the sole meaningful whole. (shrink)

(1978). George Hoggart Toulmin's theory of man and the earth in the light of the development of British geology. Annals of Science: Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 339-352.

‘There are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don’t know we don’t know.’ —Donald Rumsfeld, 2003, President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense, on the subject of the U.S. government’s failure to discover weapons of mass destruction in Iraq.

Do traits evolve because they are good for the group, or do they evolve because they are good for the individual organisms that have them? The question is whether groups, rather than individual organisms, are ever “units of selection.” My exposition begins with the 1960’s, when the idea that traits evolve because they are good for the group was criticized, not just for being factually mistaken, but for embodying a kind of confused thinking that is fundamentally at odds with the (...) logic that Darwin’s theory requires. A counter-movement has arisen since the 1960’s, called multi-level selection theory, according to which selection acts at multiple levels, including the level of the group. After discussing the 1960’s attack on group selection and the concept’s subsequent revival, I examine Darwin’s views on the subject. I discuss what Darwin says about four examples: human morality, the barbed stinger of the honeybee, neuter workers in species of social insect, and the sterility of many interspecies hybrids. I argue that Darwin defended hypotheses of group selection in the first three problems, but rejected it in the fourth. I also discuss Darwin’s general views about the role of group selection in evolution. (shrink)