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AGENCY

Team Leader : Elisabeth Pacherie

 

Individual and Collective Agency, Intentionality & Rationality

 

Our research aims at understanding the cognitive underpinnings of individual and collective action and the relationships between individual and collective agency processes. Our perspective is interdisciplinary and combines approaches from philosophy, cognitive science, psychopathology, cognitive ergonomics, law and economics.

At present, we are particularly interested in the following sets of empirical and conceptual issues :

 

  • The cognitive infrastructure of shared agency  : how do the cognitive processes and structures involved in joint action relate to those involved in individual action ? How should the notions of shared intentionality, collective perspective and we-mode be characterized ? Does empirical evidence support the idea of irreducible we-mode processes ?

  • Cognitive control  : how to define it and characterize its functions ?

  • Coordination processes and their interplay  : how do top-down and bottom-up coordination processes interact to align agent’s intentions and action so as to yield successful joint action ? What role do conventions, social norms and commitments play in fostering coordination ? How do those processes and devices connect up to relevant equilibrium notions in dynamic game-theory ?

  • Choice-models : what are the mechanisms at work in individual and collective choice and how should we model them in the framework of decision and game-theory ?

  • Phenomenology of action  : What are the relations and differences between the respective mechanisms underlying our experience of agency in individual and in joint action ? Could our experience of agency for joint action be not just quantitatively but also qualitatively different from our experience of individual agency ? What forms does the sense of agency take in human-machine interactions ?

  • Decision environments : How do individuals and groups of individuals, small or large (societies), represent and adapt to the environments in which they make their decisions ? How could environments be designed and individual and collective choice mechanisms implemented so as to maximize cognitive adequacy between decisions and their contexts ? Legal and economic mechanisms are studied in the team from that particular angle.

 

 

  TEAM MEMBERS 

Statutory Members

Post-doctoral fellows

PhD

Contractuals

Visiting students

Young PhD Students

 

 

PROJECTS

  • MAGIC : Measuring Agency in Gamified Interactive Contexts (MAGIC), V. Chambon, E. Dubourg, C. Chevallier.
  • EMOTIVA : Comment l’émotion motive l’action. ANR PRC, Julie Grèzes (LNC) & Elisabeth Pacherie, 2020-2026.
  • SOTIPAD : Ce projet de recherche examine les intéractions entre sentiment d’agentivité, influence sociale et trouble de la personnalité limite. Collaboration avec le CHU de la Pitié-Salpêtrière, financement de la Fondation de France, Valérian Chambon et Axel Baptista, 2020-2023.
  • CIRCLE  : Choice and information as cognitive rewards improving control level, ANR PRC, Valérian Chambon, B. Lau & J. Munuera, 2019-2022.
  • Reaching into the unknown  : goal-directed actions, agency and exploration, Research grant awarded by Frontiers in Cognition to Valérian Chambon & Valentin Wyart, 2019-2021
  • JointAction4HRI : Joint action for human-robot interaction, ANR PRC, Rachid Alami (LAAS, Toulouse, Michèle Guidetti (CLLE, Toulouse) & Elisabeth Pacherie (IJN), 2016-2021.
  • SAGAS : Sense of Agency in Automated Societies, ANR, Valérian Chambon & Elisabeth Pacherie

 

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

  • Chung, V., Mennella, R., Pacherie, E., & Grezes, J. (forthcoming). Emotional intensity supports social bonding independently of emotional similarity during shared experiences. Royal Society Open Science.
  • Battich, L., Pacherie, E., & Grezes, J. (2025). Social perspective-taking influences on metacognition. Cognition, 254 : 106956. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2024.105966
  • Buehler, D. (2024). The priority map. Australasian Journal of Philosophy. https://doi.org/10.1080/00048402.2024.2412243
  • Chung, V., Grèzes, J., & Pacherie, E. (2024). Collective emotion : a framework for experimental research. Emotion Review, 16(1), 28-45. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/17540739231214533
  • Buehler, D. (2023). Explicating agency : The case of visual attention. The Philosophical Quarterly, 73(2), 379-413. https://doi.org/10.1093/pq/pqac034
  • Munuera J., Ribes Agost M., Bendetowicz D., Kerebel A., Chambon V.*, Lau B*. (2023). Intrinsic motivation for choice varies with individual risk attitudes and the controllability of the environment. PLOS Computational Biology, 19(8) : e1010551
  • Vantrepotte Q., Chambon V.*, Berberian B*. (2023). The reliability of assistance systems modulates the sense of control and acceptability of human operators. Scientific Reports, 13, 14410.
  • Fernández Castro, V. & Pacherie, E. (2023) “Robots and Resentment : Commitments, recognition and social motivation in HRI” In C. Misselhorn, T. Poljansek and T. Störzinger (eds.) Emotional Machines. Perspectives from Affective Computing and Emotional Human-Machine Interaction (pp. 183-216). Dortrecht : Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-37641-3_8
  • Fernández Castro, V. & Pacherie, E. (2023). Commitments and the sense of joint agency. Mind and Language, 38,3, 889-906. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12433
  • Le Bars, S., Bourgeois-Gironde, S., Wyart, V., Dilan-Sari, I., Pacherie, E. & Chambon, V. (2022). Motor coordination and strategic cooperation in joint action. Psychological Science, 33(5), 736-751. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211053275
  • Baptista A., Jacquet P., Sidarus N., Cohen D., Chambon V. (2022). Susceptibility of self-agency to social influence. Cognition, 226, 105173.
  • Rouault M., Weiss A., Lee J. K., Bouté J., Drugowitsch J., Chambon V.* & Wyart V.* (2022). Controllability reveals defining features of information seeking. eLife, 11:e75038.
  • Sahaï, A., Caspar, E., De Beir, A., Grynszpan, O., Pacherie, E., & Berberian, B. (2023). Modulations of one’s sense of agency during human–machine interactions : a behavioural study using a full humanoid robot. Quarterly journal of experimental psychology, 76(3), 606-620. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/17470218221095841

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