School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences

About: School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences is a facility organization based out in Villejuif, France. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Politics & Context (language use). The organization has 1230 authors who have published 2084 publications receiving 57740 citations. The organization is also known as: Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales & EHESS.

Metacognition and metarepresentation: is a self-directed theory of mind a precondition for metacognition?

Abstract: Metacognition is often defined as thinking about thinking. It is exemplified in all the activities through which one tries to predict and evaluate one's own mental dispositions, states and properties for their cognitive adequacy. This article discusses the view that metacognition has metarepresentational structure. Properties such as causal contiguity, epistemic transparency and procedural reflexivity are present in metacognition but missing in metarepresentation, while open-ended recursivity and inferential promiscuity only occur in metarepresentation. It is concluded that, although metarepresentations can redescribe metacognitive contents, metacognition and metarepresentation are functionally distinct.

The Influence of Advection on the Propagation of Fronts in Reaction-Diffusion Equations

Abstract: Propagation of fronts is a phenomenon which plays a central role in a varied array of different fields. Front solutions in combustion represent propagating flames in particular in the setting of deflagrations in premixed gases (see e.g. [13, 68]). In physics and chemistry, more generally, propagating fronts describe phase transitions as a steady transformation taking place at a well defined velocity. Biological invasions or changes in populations are also often modelled as fronts (see e.g. [26], [53] and [62]). Propagation of fronts and of pulses appears indeed to be a very general phenomenon in excitable media.

A stochastic model of randomly accelerated walkers for human mobility

Abstract: Recent studies of human mobility largely focus on displacements patterns and power law fits of empirical long-tailed distributions of distances are usually associated to scale-free superdiffusive random walks called Levy flights. However, drawing conclusions about a complex system from a fit, without any further knowledge of the underlying dynamics, might lead to erroneous interpretations. Here we show, on the basis of a data set describing the trajectories of 780,000 private vehicles in Italy, that the Levy flight model cannot explain the behaviour of travel times and speeds. We therefore introduce a class of accelerated random walks, validated by empirical observations, where the velocity changes due to acceleration kicks at random times. Combining this mechanism with an exponentially decaying distribution of travel times leads to a short-tailed distribution of distances which could indeed be mistaken with a truncated power law. These results illustrate the limits of purely descriptive models and provide a mechanistic view of mobility.

Evolving networks of inventors

Abstract: In this paper we develop a model of R&D alliance formation. Pairs of firms combine their knowledge in an attempt to innovate. Whether this attempt is successful depends in part on whether the pair has been successful in the past: accumulated experience teaches a pair of firms how to innovate together, but at the same time increases the similarity of their knowledge stocks. A tension exists between the desire for a familiar partner, and desire for a partner with complementary knowledge. How this tension is resolved depends on the nature of the innovation process itself, and the elasticity of substitution of different types of knowledge inputs in knowledge production. From the alliance-innovation process, a variety of networks form. In different parts of the parameter space we observe isolated agents, a dense, connected network, and small worlds.