As a PhD student, under supervision of Franck Ramus, at the Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique, I am engaged in research about Social Cognition and Language.
When I first started my PhD, I found it difficult to study the links between Social Reasoning and Language with the tools we had available to us, for several reasons : most of the existing tasks imposed heavy linguistic requirements, allowed only one trial, and no quantitative data, and their control conditions, if any, were of poor quality. So I began to build my own material, based on animated cartoons that I created with Macromedia Flash.
All this work has to do with intuition and reasoning in Belief Processing : The aim is to better understand the nature of mental operations required in Social Reasoning, and the kind of impairments in Autism Spectrum Disorders.
We want to test the way people detect mental states in an implicit situation, rather than in a test situation. So we perform eye-tracking while presenting our stimuli to normal adults in a violation-of-expectation paradigm, and thereafter, in a pattern recognition paradigm.
We test the extent to which language is necessary to Reasoning on Beliefs, in a double task paradigm.
We also test 4 to 6 years old, in order to test the ability of our material to be used on low functionning Children.