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.

Virtual navigation tested on a mobile app is predictive of real-world wayfinding navigation performance

Abstract: Virtual reality environments presented on tablets and smartphones have potential to aid the early diagnosis of conditions such as Alzheimer9s dementia by quantifying impairments in navigation performance. However, it is unclear whether performance on mobile devices can predict navigation errors in the real world. We compared the performance of 60 participants (30 females, 18-35 years old) at wayfinding and path integration tasks designed in our mobile app `Sea Hero Quest9 with their performance at similar tasks in a real-world environment. We first performed this experiment in the streets of London (UK) and replicated it in Paris (France). In both cities, we found a significant correlation between virtual and real-world wayfinding performance and a male advantage in both environments, although smaller in the real world (Cohen9s d in the game = 0.89, in the real world = 0.59). Results in London and Paris were highly similar, and controlling for familiarity with video games did not change the results. The strength of the correlation between real world and virtual environment increased with the difficulty of the virtual wayfinding task, indicating that Sea Hero Quest does not merely capture video gaming skills. The fact that the Sea Hero Quest wayfinding task has real-world ecological validity constitutes a step toward controllable, sensitive, safe, low-cost, and easy to administer digital cognitive assessment of navigation ability.

The ‘missing middle’: class and urban governance in Delhi’s unauthorised colonies

Abstract: This research critically engages with existing theories of class and urban governance, and is empirically located in Delhi, India. The paper argues that existing theories of urban participatory governance in the global South, which polarise urban citizens and their mobilisation strategies into the elite, typically understood as guilty of ‘capturing’ participatory structures; and the poor, conceptualised as excluded from formal governance mechanisms but active in more politicised forms of mobilisation, are incomplete. This research identifies urban citizens who fit neither the ‘elite’ nor ‘poor’ conceptual binary, and explores how such ‘ordinary’ citizens engage in participatory urban governance. Empirically, research addresses Delhi’s unauthorised colonies (UCs), residential areas that have evolved mostly on private land that is not classified ‘residential’ in the Delhi Master Plan. Housing roughly a quarter to one-third of Delhi’s population and comprising a mix of classes, UCs are technically illegal locations for residential development, are consequently excluded from Delhi’s network of basic urban services (water, roads, electricity) and face potential demolition. UCs are conceptualised as representing India’s ‘missing middle’ both empirically, highlighting the multiplicity of the middle class, and conceptually, revealing the failure of binary concepts to accurately describe participatory urban governance for those in ‘the middle’. In addition, analysis highlights how UCs’ invisibility (linked to their heterogeneity – i.e. their empirical and conceptual ‘middle-ness’) functions as both an asset and a limitation in terms of participation in urban governance. The paper calls for greater recognition in academic and policy debates regarding the nuances in everyday life that are overlooked by neat binaries. As the Delhi case shows, a large proportion of urban populations are neither ‘poor’ nor ‘elite’, and arguably a similar trend is likely to exist in cities throughout the world where segments of populations demographically in ‘the middle’ are ‘missing’ from academic and policy debates.

The weight of representing the body: addressing the potentially indefinite number of body representations in healthy individuals.

Abstract: There is little consensus about the characteristics and number of body representations in the brain. In the present paper, we examine the main problems that are encountered when trying to dissociate multiple body representations in healthy individuals with the use of bodily illusions. Traditionally, task-dependent bodily illusion effects have been taken as evidence for dissociable underlying body representations. Although this reasoning holds well when the dissociation is made between different types of tasks that are closely linked to different body representations, it becomes problematic when found within the same response task (i.e., within the same type of representation). Hence, this experimental approach to investigating body representations runs the risk of identifying as many different body representations as there are significantly different experimental outputs. Here, we discuss and illustrate a different approach to this pluralism by shifting the focus towards investigating task-dependency of illusion outputs in combination with the type of multisensory input. Finally, we present two examples of behavioural bodily illusion experiments and apply Bayesian model selection to illustrate how this different approach of dissociating and classifying multiple body representations can be applied.

May's instability in large economies

Abstract: Will a large economy be stable? Building on Robert May's original argument for large ecosystems, we conjecture that evolutionary and behavioural forces conspire to drive the economy towards marginal stability. We study networks of firms in which inputs for production are not easily substitutable, as in several real-world supply chains. Relying on results from random matrix theory, we argue that such networks generically become dysfunctional when their size increases, when the heterogeneity between firms becomes too strong, or when substitutability of their production inputs is reduced. At marginal stability and for large heterogeneities, we find that the distribution of firm sizes develops a power-law tail, as observed empirically. Crises can be triggered by small idiosyncratic shocks, which lead to ``avalanches'' of defaults characterized by a power-law distribution of total output losses. This scenario would naturally explain the well-known ``small shocks, large business cycles'' puzzle, as anticipated long ago by Bak, Chen, Scheinkman, and Woodford.