What are the psychological factors that drive charitable donations? Is there a psychological gap between rich and poorer donors in preferences for charitable interventions? These are the questions we seeked to answer in a vignette study conducted on more than 700 U.S. participants.

L'humour est un type de jeu présent dans toutes les cultures humaines (Apte, 1985 ; Lefcourt, 2001). Il peut être défini comme le fait de ressentir ou d'exprimer quelque chose de surprenant et de drôle, accompagné d'une réponse émotionnelle positive telle que la joie, elle-même exprimée par des comportements spécifiques tels que le rire, le gloussement ou le sourire (Booth-Butterfield & Booth-Butterfield, 1991 ; Martin, 2007). Nos récents travaux ont montré que l'humour peut avoir une influence positive sur l'apprentissage chez les bébés (e.g.

As human beings, we spend a large part of our mental life imagining possibilities—situations that are not real. We often consider alternative possible worlds or reflect on how different versions of the past might have influenced the present. Reasoning about possibilities is essential for human survival, as it allows us to predict the future, plan our actions, and make better decisions.

As developmental science becomes more inclusive and ecologically valid, remote and online testing of infants is gaining momentum. Studying infants in their home environments holds promise: it reduces the burden on families, increases accessibility to underrepresented populations, and may yield more naturalistic behavior compared to lab settings. However, testing preverbal infants remotely comes with significant methodological challenges. Unlike older children or adults, infants cannot press buttons or follow verbal instructions, but we must rely on indirect measures such as gaze patterns.

Young children are active communicators well before they become proficient speakers. Even in preverbal stages, they engage in complex turn-taking behaviors, and their development is shaped by the responsiveness of their social environment. Yet not all responses are equal: caregivers often switch between affiliative responses (e.g., emotional mirroring, encouragement) and informative responses (e.g., labeling, correction).

Internship Context We are offering a paid six-months research internship during the academic year 2025-2026. The project focuses on Visual Perspective Taking (VPT), investigated through the N170 ERP component measured via EEG, with concurrent fNIRS recordings. The goal is to determine whether humans perceptually simulate what others see, using an innovative dual-participant paradigm featuring four conditions (active vs. passive observer and eyes open vs. closed), and test the hypothesis of an intermediate N170 amplitude when simulating another’s viewpoint.

When pairs of participants work together, an exchange of information is possible through different modalities (visual, auditory...). These sensory channels of information transmission support communication, making it more efficient. Although the influence of the visual and auditory modalities have been widely described, the role of kinesthetic cues in the interaction between two participants remains little studied.

Because ambiguity is a fundamental property of the human language, children need to develop the ability to resolve ambiguities online in order to efficiently understand spoken language and to acquire the meanings of words. However, very little is understood about the cognitive mechanisms underlying the processing of ambiguous words during sentence comprehension in children. In this project, we will study how children and adults constrain their interpretation of word meanings in situations requiring them to evaluate multiple possible interpretations for a word.

Reading research establishes that 4-to-5-year-old’s speech perception abilities (i.e., phonemic awareness) predict reading readiness and the ability to read individual words. Moreover, teaching methods that promote phonemic awareness and an understanding between letters and phonemes (e.g., Phonics) are effective at improving word reading and remediating word-reading deficits.