Francois Quesque

French Institute of Health and Medical Research | Inserm · UMRS-1172

In recent decades, the ability to represent others’ mental states (theory of mind) has gained particular attention in various disciplines ranging from ethology to cognitive neuroscience. Despite the exponentially growing interest, the functional architecture of social cognition is still unclear. In the present review, we argue that not only the voc...

Being able to discriminate between what originates from ourselves and what originates from others is critical for efficient interactions with our social environment. However, it remains an open question whether self-other distinction is a domain-general mechanism that is involved in various social-cognitive functions or whether specific ‘self-other...

Efficient perspective taking abilities are critical for successful social interactions. The aim of this study was to investigate whether and to what extent we spontaneously adopt others’ perspectives in interpreting a visual scene. Through four distinct studies, we tested whether another person’s point of view is adopted when interpreting an ambigu...

Humans attend to others' facial expressions and body language to better understand their emotions and predict goals and intentions. The eyes and its pupils reveal important social information. Because pupil size is beyond voluntary control yet reflective of a range of cognitive and affective processes, pupils in principal have the potential to conv...

In social interactions, the movements performed by others can be used to anticipate their intention. The present paper investigates whether cooperative vs competitive contexts influence the kinematics of object-directed motor actions and whether they modulate the effect of social intention on motor actions. An “Actor” and a “Partner” participated i...

It is well established that extreme prematurity can be associated with cerebellar lesions potentially affecting the neurologic prognosis. One of the commonly observed lesions in these cases is pontocerebellar hypoplasia resulting from prematurity, which can pose challenges in distinguishing it from genetically caused pontocerebellar hypoplasia. Thi...

Introduction We report a very unique clinical presentation of a patient who complained, after a left parietal brain damage, about feeling tactile stimulations on his right upper limb without being able to localize them. Methods Using a single case study approach, we report three experiments relying on several custom-made tasks to explore the diffe...

Visual illusions have always fascinated people but they have often been confined to the field of entertainment. Although philosophers, psychologists and neuroscientists have used them to explore the bases of human perception and to teach about vision, these attractive tools have still remained largely underexploited. The goal of the present paper i...

Pantomime production is commonly interpreted as reflecting tool-use-related cognitive processes. Yet, in everyday life, pantomime deserves a communication function and the exaggeration of amplitude found during pantomime compared to real tool use may reflect the individual's attempt to communicate the intended gesture. Therefore, the question arise...

Introduction Paroxysmal tonic upgaze (PTU), defined as an involuntary upward movement of the eyes, has been considered as a benign phenomenon but may also be associated with ataxia and developmental delay. To date, CACNA1G mutations have been reported in autosomal dominant spinocerebellar ataxia designated SCA42 and in early encephalopathies with c...

Previous studies have shown that objects located in the peripersonal space (PPS) receive enhanced attention, as compared to extrapersonal space (EPS), However, most objects in the environment belong to someone in particular and how object ownership influences object coding in relation to PPS representation is still unclear. In the present study, af...

Mentalizing and emotion recognition are impaired in behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia (bvFTD). It is not clear whether these abilities are also disturbed in other conditions with prominent frontal lobe involvement, such as progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). Our aim was to investigate social cognition (facial emotion recognition, recogni...

Measures of social cognition have now become central in neuropsychology, being essential for early and differential diagnoses, follow-up, and rehabilitation in a wide range of conditions. With the scientific world becoming increasingly interconnected, international neuropsychological and medical collaborations are burgeoning to tackle the global ch...

Measures of social cognition have now become central in neuropsychology, being essential for early and differential diagnoses, follow-up and rehabilitation in a wide range of conditions. With the scientific world becoming increasingly interconnected, international neuropsychological and medical collaborations are burgeoning to tackle the global cha...

As a key domain of cognition, social cognition abilities are altered in a wide range of clinical groups. Accordingly, many clinical tests and theories of social cognition have been developed these last decades. Contrasting this abundant development from a research perspective, recent evidence suggests that social cognition remains rarely addressed...

A travers cet article, nous détaillons la façon dont est conceptualisée et opérationnalisée la cognition sociale. Encore relativement jeune du point de vue de l'évaluation neuropsychologique, cette dimension cognitive supposée a bénéficié d'un essor important ces 20 dernières années. Pourtant, les clinicien·ne·s rapportent se sentir démuni·e·s dans...

Les neurones miroirs et les principales théories associées ont occupé et occupent encore une place importante dans les neurosciences et la psychologie, s’immisçant même très fréquemment dans de nombreux domaines non scientifiques. Malgré d’importantes limites, ils persistent à inspirer les chercheurs qui leur trouvent des implications potentielles...

Aim: Lower interoceptive abilities are a characteristic of chronic pain conditions. Social support plays an important role in chronic low back pain (cLBP) but social cognitive skills have rarely been investigated. This study aimed to characterize interoceptive and social cognitive abilities in cLBP and to study the relationship between both domains...

Objectives: To evaluate the impact of nonviolent communication (NVC) training on five aspects of medical students' empathy skills using implicit and explicit measures. Methods: 312 third-year French medical students were randomly allocated to an intervention group (n = 123) or a control group (n = 189). The intervention group received 2.5 days o...

Introduction L’influence des facteurs culturels sur les capacités à interagir efficacement avec nos pairs reste mal comprise. Cette question est centrale car la plupart des tests sont développés dans des contextes très spécifiques non représentatifs de la population mondiale. Objectifs À travers une étude internationale, nous souhaitions tester l’...

Upon learning of the story of Cinderella, most people spontaneously adopt the emotional perspective of this helpless young woman rather than of her older sisters who oppress her. The present research examines whether this pattern reveals a general human tendency to empathise more with the emotions of individuals with low (versus high) power. Six ex...

Français : La cognition sociale renvoie aux processus cognitifs qui sous-tendent les interactions avec autrui. Elle est déficitaire dans de nombreuses maladies mentales, dont la variante comportementale de la dégénéres- cence fronto-temporale. Dans un but diagnostique, la batterie mini-SEA permet l’évaluation des capacités de reconnaissance des émo...

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, barrier gestures such as regular hand-washing, social distancing, and wearing a face mask are highly recommended. Critically, interpersonal distance (IPD) depends on the affective dimension of social interaction, which might be affected by the current Covid-19 context. In the present internet-based experimen...

Background Decades of researches aiming to unveil truths about human neuropsychology may have instead unveil facts appropriate to only a fraction of the world’s population: those living in western educated rich democratic nations (Muthukrishna et al., 2020 Psych Sci). So far, most studies were conducted as if education and cultural assumptions on w...

Human description of the surrounding world may spontaneously rely on others’ perspective, which is a crucial component of social cognition. In five studies, participants were asked to describe the spatial relations between objects in visual scenes including, or not, other agents. In Experiment 1, a substantial proportion of participants used an oth...

Humans have developed specific abilities to interact efficiently with their conspecifics (social cognition). Despite abundant behavioral and neuroscientific research, the influence of cultural factors on these skills remains poorly understood. This issue is of particular importance as most cognitive tasks are developed in highly specific contexts,...

In the context of the Covid-19 pandemic, barrier gestures such as regular hand-washing, social distancing, and wearing a face mask are highly recommended. Critically, interpersonal distances (IPDs) depend on the physical and emotional dimensions involved in social interactions, two factors that might be affected by the current Covid-19 context. In...

Peripersonal space is a multisensory representation of the environment around the body in relation to the motor system, underlying the interactions with the physical and social world. Although changing body properties and social context have been shown to alter the functional processing of space, little is known about how changing the value of obje...

Peripersonal space represents the area around the body where objects are coded in motor terms for the purpose of voluntary goal-directed actions. Previous studies have suggested that peripersonal space is also a safe space linked with our private area, influencing interpersonal space in social contexts. However, whether these two spaces rely on sim...

In this paper, we propose to analyze the kinematic of human arm to predict social intention (personal vs. social intention). We propose to use infrared markers placed on the arms of two human subjects. The trajectories of different markers are defined as shape spaces and subsequently analyzed as a Riemannian manifold for the purposes of characteriz...

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans une approche incarnée de la cognition sociale, selon laquelle la capacité à comprendre les états mentaux d’autres individus ne nécessite aucune inférence mais repose plutôt sur l’expérience immédiate des informations sensori-motrices perçues lors d’interactions sociales. D’importantes limites ont été formulées à l’encontr...

Cette thèse s’inscrit dans une approche incarnée de la cognition sociale, selon laquelle la capacité à comprendre les états mentaux d’autres individus ne nécessite aucune inférence mais repose plutôt sur l’expérience immédiate des informations sensori-motrices perçues lors d’interactions sociales. D’importantes limites ont été formulées à l’encontr...

Spatio-temporal parameters of voluntary motor action may help optimize human social interactions. Yet it is unknown whether individuals performing a cooperative task spontaneously perceive subtly informative social cues emerging through voluntary actions. In the present study, an auditory cue was provided through headphones to an Actor and a Partne...

As social animals, it is crucial to understand others' intention. But is it possible to detect social intention in two actions that have the exact same motor goal? In the present study, we presented participants with video clips of an individual reaching for and grasping an object to either use it (personal trial) or to give his partner the opportu...

Although action and perception are central components of our interactions with the external world, the most recent experimental investigations also support their implications in the emotional, decision-making, and goal ascription processes in social context. In this article, we review the existing literature supporting this view and highlighting a...

Previous studies have shown that the spatio-temporal parameters of reach-to-grasp movement are influenced by the social context in which the motor action is performed. In particular, when interacting with a confederate, movements are slower, with longer initiation times and more ample trajectories, which has been interpreted as implicit communicati...

Optimal control models of biological movements are used to account for those internal variables that constrain voluntary goal-directed actions. They, however, do not take into account external environmental constraints as those associated to social intention. We investigated here the effects of the social context on kinematic characteristics of seq...