Publications related to Thought

Uncovering interactions between Descending Neurons as a functional principle of behavioural control

Animals, including humans, exhibit a remarkable variety of complex behaviours. How the nervous system controls all these behaviours ranging from simple, stereotyped movements to flexible, adaptive actions is a central questions of neuroscience. One of the ...

EPFL2024

Les Cahiers de l'Ibois 3 / Ibois Notebook 3

Petras Vestartas, Sandra Vuilleumier

Before the twentieth century and concrete modernity, it was stone that embodied the “well built”. Could sustainable wood one day replace concrete as the archetypal material? Will it find a place on the scale of values that gives archi- tecture its referenc ...

EPFL PRESS2022

The CT-cube: A framework for the design and the assessment of computational thinking activities

Francesco Mondada, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy, Alberto Piatti

Computational thinking is a fundamental competence that is being introduced in K-12 and succeeding curricula worldwide. Despite this huge effort, many computational thinking models in the literature do not explicitly take into consideration the pupils’ age ...

2022

Mediating Computational Thinking Through Educational Robotics In Primary School

Morgane Solène Denise Chevalier

Nowadays, computational thinking (CT) is considered a skill to be taught. While educational robotics (ER) appears promising to foster students' CT, operational CT frameworks and explicit guidance in ER are lacking. This thesis thus proposes to understand h ...

EPFL2022

Assessing Computational Thinking: Development and Validation of the Algorithmic Thinking Test for Adults

Olivier Lévêque, Cécile Hardebolle, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Marc Lafuente Martinez

This study describes the development and validation process of a computational thinking (CT) test for adults. The team designed a set of items and explored a subset of those through two qualitative pilots. Then, in order to provide validity evidence based ...

2022

Dataset for the validation of a Computational Thinking test for upper primary school (grades 3-4)

Francesco Mondada, Jessica Elke Dehler Zufferey, Barbara Bruno, Laila Abdelsalam El-Hamamsy

This dataset contains quantitative student data acquired during the administration of a new computational thinking assessment for upper primary school (grades 3 and 4). Over 1500 students (approximately half in grade 3 and half in grade 4) participated in ...

2022

Familiarity as a Practical Sense of Place

Maxime Carl Felder

Familiarity is an elusive concept, capturing what we know intimately and what we only recognize from having seen before. This article aims to disambiguate these interpretations by proposing a sociological conceptualization of familiarity as a dynamic relat ...

2021

Tracing Embodied Narratives of Critical Thinking

Aditi Kothiyal, Shitanshu Mishra

Critical Thinking (CrT) is generally characterized as an abstract thinking process, detached from the (bodily) actions one engages in during the process. Though recent cognitive theories assert that all thinking is action-based, the embodied and distribute ...

SPRINGER INTERNATIONAL PUBLISHING AG2021

Tactile spatial discrimination on the torso using vibrotactile and force stimulation

Olaf Blanke, Oliver Alan Kannape, Masayuki Hara, Matteo Franza

There is a steadily growing number of mobile communication systems that provide spatially encoded tactile information to the humans’ torso. However, the increased use of such hands-off displays is currently not matched with or supported by systematic perce ...

2021

An Ink–and–Paper Automaton: The Conceptual Mechanization of Cognition and the Practical Automation of Reasoning in Leibniz’s De Affectibus (1679)

Simon François Dumas Primbault

On ten loose handwritten folios dating back from April 1679, Leibniz gradually devised, in the course of three days, a full-blown theory of thought that nonetheless remained unpublished and still has received little attention from scholars. Conceiving of a ...

2020

Thought consciousness and source monitoring depend on robotically-controlled sensorimotor conflicts and illusory states

Olaf Blanke, Hannes Bleuler, Fosco Bernasconi, Herberto Dhanis Pedro De Barros Camacho, Andrea Serino, Roy Salomon, Giulio Rognini, Masayuki Hara, Marco Solcà, Giedre Stripeikyte, Polona Pozeg, Pierre Progin

Thought insertion (TI) is characterized by the experience that certain thoughts, occurring in one’s mind, are not one’s own, but the thoughts of somebody else and suggestive of a psychotic disorder. We report a robotics-based method able to investigate the ...

2020

Benjamin's Flu

Christophe van Gerrewey

Walter Benjamin suffered from the Spanish Flu, but he never wrote about this global pandemic. There are three possible reasons for this oblivion, and several consequences for architecture's relationship with the current virus dominating our thoughts and ac ...

2020

Disorder‐Induced Signal Filtering with Topological Metamaterials

Romain Christophe Rémy Fleury, Farzad Zangeneh Nejad

Disorder, ubiquitously present in realistic structures, is generally thought to disturb the performance of analog wave devices, as it often causes strong multiple scattering effects that largely arrest wave transportation. Contrary to this general view, he ...

Wiley2020

Unraveling neural and behavioral mechanisms of cognitive self-attenuation and alienation

Giedre Stripeikyte

The present thesis aimed at investigating behavioral and neural underpinnings of the mechanisms related to the different aspects of self-monitoring. The first aim was to study functional connectivity alterations related to the mechanisms accounting for the ...

EPFL2020

Lieu hologrammatique, un concept et une méthodologie complexe de mesure de l'organisation spatiale des réalités sociales

Thibault Pierre Louis Romany

The urban is a complex phenomenon whose exploration remains a important scientific challenge. Choosing complex thought in order to renew our capacities for understanding and action on and with the urban is not trivial. The complex thought developed by Edga ...

EPFL2020

Analytic performance modeling and analysis of detailed neuron simulations

Felix Schürmann, Francesco Cremonesi, Gerhard Wellein

Big science initiatives are trying to reconstruct and model the brain by attempting to simulate brain tissue at larger scales and with increasingly more biological detail than previously thought possible. The exponential growth of parallel computer perform ...

2020

Underlying mechanisms of episodic autobiographical memory and self-consciousness

Lucie Bréchet

Cognitive neuroscience has been examining consciousness associated with the subject, that is the self of the conscious experience and its related multisensory processing of bodily signals, the so-called bodily self-consciousness. Different line of research ...

EPFL2019

Espace public comme objet per se? Une analyse critique de la conception contemporaine

Sonia Monique Curnier

The recognition during the second half of the 20th century of the essential role played by public spaces in the definition of qualitative urban life has led to a reconsideration of their design. This has occurred in many different forms, such as the emerge ...

EPFL2018

Neuronal morphologies: the shapes of thoughts

Lida Kanari

The mammalian brain, one of the most fascinating systems in nature, is a complex biological structure that has kept scientists busy for over a century. Many of the brain's mysteries have been unraveled due to the enormous efforts of the scientific communit ...

EPFL2018

How grouping determines crowding

Michael Herzog

Crowding is traditionally thought to occur by local interactions between the target and the neighboring flankers, for example, by pooling neural responses corresponding to both the target and flankers. Accordingly, crowding is thought to occur within a sma ...

2017