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.

A Neuromathematical Model for Geometrical Optical Illusions

Abstract: Geometrical optical illusions have been object of many studies due to the possibility they offer to understand the behavior of low-level visual processing. They consist in situations in which the perceived geometrical properties of an object differ from those of the object in the visual stimulus. Starting from the geometrical model introduced by Citti and Sarti (J Math Imaging Vis 24(3):307---326, 2006), we provide a mathematical model and a computational algorithm which allows to interpret these phenomena and to qualitatively reproduce the perceived misperception.

Negotiating care: patient tactics at an urban South African hospital.

Abstract: Objectives:To examine the various ways in which patients sought to influence the care they received in the admission and adult medical services of a large urban, academic hospital in South Africa. These included the steps taken by patients to increase their access to services and improve their experience of care.Methods:Part of a qualitative study of rationing behaviour, the methods combined, observations, interviews and a survey.Results:Patient's actions were oriented to two main goals: obtaining care and preserving their sense of self and dignity. These actions shaped patients’ pathways in five key ways: meeting the entry criteria for admission; presenting as a cooperative, expert patient; mobilizing social networks among health care staff; making use of complaints mechanisms; and deploying narratives of resistance.Conclusions:Patients made tactical use of small spaces at the margins of the health care system. Although, with some exceptions, they had limited impact on the care received in the hospital, ...

On the role of refixations in letter strings: The influence of oculomotor factors

Abstract: Recent studies of reading and word recognition have shown that eye-movement behavior depends strongly on the position in the word that the eye first fixates; the probability of refixating in a word is lowest with the eye near the middle of the word, and it increases as the eye fixates to either side. It has generally been assumed that the cause for thisoptimal landing position phenomenon lies in the very strong drop-off of visual acuity even within the fovea; refixation shouid be more likely when the eye starts from a noncentral position, because here less information can be extracted during one fixation. It may, however, be the case that the phenomenon is caused not by acuity drop-off, but by differences in within-word oculomotor scanning tactics as a function of the position that the eye initially fixates. To test this, in the present experiment we kept visual information constant while we varied the initial fixation position. We used homogeneous strings of letters of different length. One letter in each string was different from the rest (e.g., kkkkkok), and this was the letter that the subject initially fixated. This target letter had to be identified before saccading to a comparison string. The position of the target letter in the string was varied from trial to trial. If, owing to acuity limitations, refixations reflect insufficient information extraction, then, because the target letter is always directly fixated, the pattern of refixations in this condition shouid be independent of the first fixation position. However, the obtained refixation probability showed a strong dependence on the position of first fixation. The number of refixations was independent of the absolute length of the letter strings,but it seemed to be influenced by the proportion of the string over which the eye had to pass. The larger this proportion, the higher the probability of refixation. The results suggest that to a cer-tain extent refixations in letter strings (or words) reflect properties of the oculomotor system rather than visual information extraction.

Longform recordings of everyday life: Ethics for best practices.

Abstract: Recent advances in large-scale data storage and processing offer unprecedented opportunities for behavioral scientists to collect and analyze naturalistic data, including from underrepresented groups. Audio data, particularly real-world audio recordings, are of particular interest to behavioral scientists because they provide high-fidelity access to subtle aspects of daily life and social interactions. However, these methodological advances pose novel risks to research participants and communities. In this article, we outline the benefits and challenges associated with collecting, analyzing, and sharing multi-hour audio recording data. Guided by the principles of autonomy, privacy, beneficence, and justice, we propose a set of ethical guidelines for the use of longform audio recordings in behavioral research. This article is also accompanied by an Open Science Framework Ethics Repository that includes informed consent resources such as frequent participant concerns and sample consent forms.

The explosion problem in a flow

Abstract: We consider the explosion problem in an incompressible flow introduced in the paper of H. Berestycki, L. Kagan, G. Joulin and G. Sivashinsky. We use a novel $L^p-L^\infty$ estimate for elliptic advection-diffusion problems to show that the explosion threshold obeys a positive lower bound which is uniform in the advecting flow. We also identify the flows for which the explosion threshold tends to infinity as their amplitude grows and obtain an effective description of the explosion threshold in the strong flow asymptotics in a two-dimensional one-cell flow.