Elisabeth Pacherie

Institut Jean Nicod · Institute of Cognitive Studies

We often effortlessly take the perceptual perspective of others: we represent some aspect of the environment that others currently perceive. However, taking someone's perspective can interfere with one's perceptual processing: another person's gaze can spontaneously affect our ability to detect stimuli in a scene. But it is still unclear whether ou...

Sharing emotions with other individuals is a widespread phenomenon. Previous research proposed that experiencing intense and similar emotions with other individuals reinforces social bonds. However, several aspects of this phenomenon remain unclear, notably whether social bonding requires the convergence and synchronization of emotions in the group...

Sharing emotions with other individuals is a widespread phenomenon. Previous research proposed that experiencing intense and similar emotions with other individuals reinforces social bonds. However, several aspects remain unclear, notably whether social bonding requires the convergence and synchronization of emotions in the group, and whether these...

We often effortlessly take the perceptual perspective of others: we represent some aspect of the environment that others currently perceive. However, taking someone's perspective can interfere with one's perceptual processing: another person's gaze can spontaneously affect our ability to detect stimuli in a scene. But it is still unclear whether ou...

Research on collective emotion spans social sciences, psychology and philosophy. There are detailed case studies and diverse theories of collective emotion. However, experimental evidence regarding the universal characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective emotion remains sparse. Moreover, current research mainly relies on emotion se...

To advance the task of designing robots capable of performing collective tasks with humans, studies in human–robot interaction often turn to psychology, philosophy of mind and neuroscience for inspiration. In the same vein, this chapter explores how the notion of recognition and commitment can help confront some of the current problems in addressin...

The purpose of this article is to explore the role commitments may play in shaping our sense of joint agency. First, we propose that commitments may contribute to the generation of the sense of joint agency by stabilizing expectations and improving predictability. Second, we argue that commitments have a normative element that may bolster an agent'...

Naturalistic joint action between two agents typically requires both motor coordination and strategic cooperation. However, these two fundamental processes have systematically been studied independently. We presented 50 dyads of adult participants with a novel collaborative task that combined different levels of motor noise with different levels of...

Although previous investigations reported a reduced sense of agency when individuals act with traditional machines, little is known about the mechanisms underpinning interactions with human-like automata. The aim of this study was twofold: (1) to investigate the effect of the machine’s physical appearance on the individuals’ sense of agency, and (2...

A bustling literature spanning philosophy, psychology and social sciences aims for a better understanding of the collective patterns of emotions stirring human society. To date, however, this endeavour is still in need of a unifying conceptual framework and empirical evidence regarding the characteristics, antecedents and consequences of collective...

The vast expansion of research in human-robot interactions (HRI) these last decades has been accompanied by the design of increasingly skilled robots for engaging in joint actions with humans. However, these advances have encountered significant challenges to ensure fluent interactions and sustain human motivation through the different steps of joi...

This paper concerns the credibility problem for commitments. Commitments play an important role in cooperative human interactions and can dramatically improve the performance of joint actions by stabilizing expectations, reducing the uncertainty of the interaction, providing reasons to cooperate or improving action coordination. However, commitment...

The objective of this paper is to characterize the rich interplay between automatic and cognitive control processes that we propose is the hallmark of skill, in contrast to habit, and what accounts for its flexibility. We argue that this interplay isn't entirely hierarchical and static, but rather heterarchical and dynamic. We further argue that it...

A main obstacle to the successful pursuit of long-term goals is a lack of self-control. But what is the capacity for self-control? The aim of this chapter is to contribute to an overarching theory of self-control by exploring the proposal that it is best understood as a form of hybrid skill. The authors draw on recent work on skill in the domain of...

In this chapter, we attempt to answer the question, By what steps could members of a group capable of acting together with a purpose, coordinating flexibly, communicating cooperatively and deceiving competitors be constructed from creatures with minimal social skills and cognitive abilities? The method we use is creature construction: the idea is t...

This volume brings together top scholars in the philosophy of mind and action to discuss minimality in cooperation. In general, ‘minimality’ can be understood in a diverse number of ways. It can refer, for example, to the minimal or necessary criteria for cooperation or, alternatively, ‘minimal’ can be understood in the sense of ‘basic’ or ‘simple’...

The sense of agency (SoA) experienced in joint action is an essential subjective dimension of human cooperativeness, but we still know little about the specific factors that contribute to its emergence or alteration. In the present study, dyads of participants were instructed to coordinate their key presses to move a cursor up to a specific target...

An important tradition in philosophy holds that in order to successfully perform a joint action, the participants must be capable of establishing commitments on joint goals and shared plans. This suggests that social robotics should endow robots with similar competences for commitment management in order to achieve the objective of performing joint...

The sense of agency (SoA) experienced in joint action is an essential subjective dimension of human cooperativeness, but we still know little about the specific factors that contribute to its emergence or alteration. In the present study, dyads of participants were instructed to coordinate their key presses to move a cursor up to a specific target...

Hypnotic suggestions can lead to altered experiences of agency, reality, and memory. The present work is primarily concerned with alterations of the sense of agency (SoA) following motor suggestions. When people respond to the suggestion that their arm is rising up all by itself, they usually have a feeling of passivity for their action. The mechan...

In his book, Understanding Institutions, Francesco Guala discusses two solutions to the problem of mindreading for coordination, the solution thinking approach proposed by Adam Morton and the team reasoning approach developed by Michael Bacharach, Robert Sugden, and Natalie Gold. I argue that the family resemblance between the two approaches is eve...

Ten years ago, one of us proposed a dynamic hierarchical model of intentions that brought together philosophical work on intentions and empirical work on motor representations and motor control (Pacherie, 2008). The model distinguished among Distal intentions, Proximal intentions, and Motor intentions operating at different levels of action control...

[This corrects the article on p. 52 in vol. 11, PMID: 29081744.].

Phenomenology is concerned with the study of subjective experience and investigates the structure and nature of various types of conscious experiences. But what is collective phenomenology about? This paper discusses three main issues. Can a collective as such be a locus of subjective experience or should we conceive of collective phenomenal states...

Nowadays, interactions with others do not only involve human peers but also automated systems. Many studies suggest that the motor predictive systems that are engaged during action execution are also involved during joint actions with peers and during other human generated action observation. Indeed, the comparator model hypothesis suggests that th...

A full account of purposive action must appeal not only to propositional attitude states like beliefs, desires, and intentions, but also to motor representations, i.e., non-propositional states that are thought to represent, among other things, action outcomes as well as detailed kinematic features of bodily movements. This raises the puzzle of how...

For more than a decade, the field of human-robot interaction has generated many valuable contributions of interest to the robotics community at large. The field is vast and addresses issues in perception, decision, action, communication and learning, as well as their integration. At the same time, research on human-human joint action has become a t...

This document is an extended version of the one published in the proceedings of RoboPhilosophy conference

The ability to infer other people’s intentions is crucial for successful human social interactions. Such inference relies on an adaptive interplay of sensory evidence and prior expectations. Crucially, this interplay would also depend on the type of intention inferred, i.e., on how abstract the intention is. However, what neural mechanisms adjust t...

A unique interdisciplinary collection of papers and commentaries by leading researchers and rising scholars, representing the latest research on consciousness, mind, and brain. This collection offers the most comprehensive collection on consciousness, brain, and mind available. It gathers 39 original papers by leaders in the field followed by comme...

A unique interdisciplinary collection of papers and commentaries by leading researchers and rising scholars, representing the latest research on consciousness, mind, and brain. This collection offers the most comprehensive collection on consciousness, brain, and mind available. It gathers 39 original papers by leaders in the field followed by comme...

A unique interdisciplinary collection of papers and commentaries by leading researchers and rising scholars, representing the latest research on consciousness, mind, and brain. This collection offers the most comprehensive collection on consciousness, brain, and mind available. It gathers 39 original papers by leaders in the field followed by comme...

Intégration de l’action, de l’action conjointe et de l’apprentissage dans les architectures cognitives robotiques. À l’opposé des recherches en Intelligence Artificielle, où des algorithmes conçus pour des problèmes spécifiques peuvent être testés dans des conditions de simulation parfaitement contrôlée, la Robotique a toujours eu à faire face à la...

There are three projects within the cognitive science of agency and consciousness that are of particular interest to neuroethics: the descriptive project, the genetic project, and the substantive project. The descriptive project is concerned with characterizing our everyday experience of, and beliefs about, agency. What is the folk view of agency?...

The HRI 2015 Workshop "Towards a Framework for Joint Action" is a full-day workshop held in conjunction with the 10th ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction, in Portland (USA) on March 2nd 2015. The first edition of the workshop took place at RO-MAN 2014. This workshop aims at bringing together researchers from several discipl...

What are intentions for? Do they have a primary purpose or function? If so, what is this function? I start with a discussion of three existing approaches to these questions. One account, associated with Michael Bratman’s planning theory of agency, emphasizes the pragmatic functions of intentions: having the capacity to form intentions allows us to...

A central claim in Michael Bratman’s account of shared agency is that there need be no radical conceptual, metaphysical or normative discontinuity between robust forms of small-scale shared intentional agency, i.e., modest sociality, and individual planning agency. What I propose to do is consider another potential discontinuity, whose existence wo...

In this paper, we evaluate the proposal that a central function of com-mitments within joint action is to reduce various kinds of uncertainty, and that this accounts for the prevalence of commitments in joint action. While this idea is prima facie attractive, we argue that it faces two serious problems. First, com-mitments can only reduce uncertain...

The phenomenology of controlling what one perceives is influenced by a combination of sensory predictions and inferential processes. While it is known that external perturbations can reduce the sense of control over action effects, there have been few studies investigating the impact of intentional co-actors on the sense of control. In three experi...

Philosophers have proposed accounts of shared intentions that aim at capturing what makes a joint action intentionally joint. On these accounts, having a shared intention typically presupposes cognitively and conceptually demanding theory of mind skills. Yet, young children engage in what appears to be intentional, cooperative joint action long bef...

This paper is concerned with the role of conscious agency in human action. On a folk-psychological view of the structure of agency, intentions, conceived as conscious mental states, are the causes of actions. In the last decades, the development of new psychological and neuroscientific methods has made conscious agency an object of empirical investi...

This paper on the phenomenology of joint agency proposes a foray into a little explored territory at the intersection of two very active domains of research: joint action and sense of agency. I explore two ways in which our experience of joint agency may differ from our experience of individual agency. First, the mechanisms of action specification...

Sir, In a recent study (Chambon et al., 2011), we investigated the ability of patients with schizophrenia to make accurate predictions about other people's intentions. This ability has long been shown to be impaired in schizophrenia, and this impairment may be ac-counted for by an abnormal integration of two different sources of information: the se...

Cognitive science is a cross-disciplinary enterprise devoted to understanding the nature of the mind. In recent years, investigators in philosophy, psychology, the neurosciences, artificial intelligence, and a host of other disciplines have come to appreciate how much they can learn from one another about the various dimensions of cognition. The re...

Interdisciplinary perspectives on definitional concerns, underlying mechanisms, and the functional significance of joint attention. Academic interest in the phenomenon of joint attention—the capacity to attend to an object together with another creature—has increased rapidly over the past two decades. Yet it isn't easy to spell out in detail what j...

This chapter aims at investigating the phenomenology of joint action and at gaining a better understanding of (1) how the sense of agency one experiences when engaged in a joint action differs from the sense of agency one has for individual actions and (2) how the sense of agency one experiences when engaged in a joint action differs according to t...

In recent years, the integration of philosophical with scientific theorizing has started to yield new insights. This chapter surveys some recent philosophical and empirical work on the nature and structure of action, on conscious agency, and on our knowledge of actions.

The aim of the present study was to explore the basis of the strong feeling of conviction and the high resistance to change characteristic of delusions and to test whether patients with schizophrenia suffering from delusions have specific metacognitive impairments when compared to both patients without delusions and healthy controls. 14 actively de...

An impaired ability to appreciate other people's mental states is a well-established and stable cognitive deficit in schizophrenia, which might explain some aspects of patients' social dysfunction. Yet, despite a wealth of literature on this topic, the basic mechanisms underlying these impairments are still poorly understood, and their links with t...

Many philosophers have offered accounts of shared actions aimed at capturing what makes joint actions intentionally joint. I first discuss two leading accounts of shared intentions, proposed by Michael Bratman and Margaret Gilbert. I argue that Gilbert’s account imposes more normativity on shared intentions than is strictly needed and that Bratman’...

Basic experiment: psychometric curve fit to the cumulative distribution of participant's correct responses (red dots). Responses for the different actions were pooled across. The blue dot refers to the inflexion point of the sigmoid curve. In each experiment, the inflexion point occurs at the following duration: A. Basic: 1576 ms. B. Superord.: 155...

Pre-tests: intra- and inter-sequence comparisons; selection of low, moderate and high amounts of information. (DOC)

Distribution of participant's reaction times (blue dots) across the 12 movie segments. Reaction times for the different actions were pooled across subjects. Red squares: mean reaction times across participants for each of the 12 duration ranges. (TIF)

Explaining or predicting the behaviour of our conspecifics requires the ability to infer the intentions that motivate it. Such inferences are assumed to rely on two types of information: (1) the sensory information conveyed by movement kinematics and (2) the observer's prior expectations--acquired from past experience or derived from prior knowledg...

In this paper I argue that, to make intentional actions fully intelligible, we need to posit representations of action the content of which is nonconceptual. I further argue that an analysis of the properties of these nonconceptual representations, and of their relationships to action representations at higher levels, sheds light on the limits of i...

The concept of intention can do useful work in psychological theory. Many authors have insisted on a qualitative difference between prospective and intentions regarding their type of content, with prospective intentions generally being more abstract than immediate intentions. However, we suggest that the main basis of this distinction is temporal:...

Pivotal to the mutual shaping of self and agency is the sense of agency, or agentive self-awareness. I offer a brief survey of recent models of how and where in the cognitive architecture the sense of agency is generated. I also argue that these models should be seen as complementary rather than as rivals. Building on that basis, I then turn to iss...

After a long period of neglect, the phenomenology of action has recently regained its place in the agenda of philosophers and scientists alike. The recent explosion of interest in the topic highlights its complexity. The purpose of this paper is to propose a conceptual framework allowing for a more precise characterization of the many facets of the...

The paper discusses the role affective factors may play in explaining why, in Capgras'delusion, the delusional belief once formed is maintained and argues that there is an important link between the modularity of the relevant emotional system and the persistence of the delusional belief.

Ce chapitre a pour objectif de s'interroger sur la pertinence réciproque des recherches menées en philosophie de l'esprit et en neurosciences. Il revient sur la distinction entre niveaux personnel et subpersonnel dans la mise en œuvre de la simulation de l'action. Pour défendre une distinction tranchée entre ces niveaux, on a avancé que le niveau p...

This paper contrasts two approaches to agentive self-awareness: a high level, narrative-based account, and a low-level comparator-based account. We argue that an agent's narrative self-conception has a role to play in explaining their agentive judgments, but that agentive experiences are explained by low-level comparator mechanisms that are grounde...

Two main approaches can be discerned in the literature on agentive self-awareness: a top-down approach, according to which agentive self-awareness is fundamentally holistic in nature and involves the operations of a central-systems narrator, and a bottom-up approach that sees agentive self-awareness as produced by lowlevel processes grounded in the...

The now growing literature on the content and sources of the phenomenology of first-person agency highlights the multi-faceted character of the phenomenology of agency and makes it clear that the experience of agency includes many other experiences as components. This paper examines the possible relations between these components of our experience...

Three commitments guide Dennett’s approach to the study of consciousness. First, an ontological commitment to materialist monism. Second, a methodological commitment to what he calls ‘heterophenomenology.’ Third, a ‘doxological’ commitment that can be expressed as the view that there is no room for a distinction between a subject’s beliefs about ho...

Although current models of delusion converge in proposing that delusions are based on unusual experiences, they differ in the role that they accord experience in the formation of delusions. On some accounts, the experience comprises the very content of the delusion, whereas on other accounts the delusion is adopted in an attempt to explain an unusu...

The discovery of mirror neurons has given rise to a number of interpretations of their functions together with speculations on their potential role in the evolution of specifically human capacities. Thus, mirror neurons have been thought to ground many aspects of human social cognition, including the capacity to engage in cooperative collective act...

In this paper, I offer a sketch of a dynamic theory of intentions. I argue that several categories or forms of intentions should be distinguished based on their different (and complementary) functional roles and on the different contents or types of contents they involve. I further argue that an adequate account of the distinctive nature of actions...

Leading scholars continue the debate over whether consciousness causes behavior or plays no functional role in it, discussing the question in terms of neuroscience, philosophy, law, and public policy. Our intuition tells us that we, our conscious selves, cause our own voluntary acts. Yet scientists have long questioned this; Thomas Huxley, for exam...

The concept of intention is used to characterize both actions and states of mind. To a first approximation, we classify actions as intentional if they are both purposeful and voluntary and we say that someone intends or has the intention to do something if he is settled on so acting.

It is widely assumed, both in philosophy and in the cognitive sciences, that perception essentially involves a relative or egocentric frame of reference. Levinson has explicitly challenged this assumption, arguing instead in favour of the 'neo-Whorfian' hypothesis that the frame of reference dominant in a given language infiltrates spatial represen...

In this paper we defend the doxastic conception of delusions against the metacognitive account developed by Greg Currie and collaborators. According to the metacognitive model, delusions are imaginings that are misidentified by their subjects as beliefs: the Capgras patient, for instance, does not believe that his wife has been replaced by a robot,...

It is generally agreed that there is a distinction between two kinds of representations of space and time. Perspectival or egocentric representations are viewpoint-dependent in the sense that the way spatial and temporal positions and relations are represented is relative to one's own position in space or time. In contrast, objective representation...