Research

Hierarchies, Recursion, Brains and Historical Cycles

My broad research topic is the investigation of the mechanisms, evolution, and social functions of hierarchical cognition. During most of my career, I worked as a cognitive scientist and studied the cognitive and neural mechanisms underlying the representation of hierarchical structures. In 2019, however, I switched to a different research topic. As multiple social crises unfolded, I sought to apply cognitive science tools to study the processes of social change. I moved to the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and participated in developing the new field of Historical Psychology. This field uses computational social science tools to assess the relationship between psychological change, socio-economic trends, and political events.

Using computational tools to retrieve the values, preferences, and cognitive imprints of people from the past, we study how the cultural zeitgeist co-varies with socioeconomic trends and historical events.  (Theory, Methods)

Part of our work focuses on the Early Modern Period and the relationships between:

• Prosocial sentiments and democratizing political shifts.
• Romantic love, affluence, and investment in partners.
• Cognitive and Moral virtues and the onset of Industrialization.

We also study how psychological and social stress impacts the complexity, pessimism, and dichotomous thinking expressed in Hollywood movies.

I study hierarchies from the perspective of the biological evolution of cognitive functions using experimental psychology and neuroscientific approaches.

I generated theoretical and behavioral approaches to test for the cognitive and neural underpinnings of hierarchical and recursive thought across various domains, including language, music, action, and vision, in children, adults, and neurological patients.

Generally, we found that language areas and fundamental memory areas, such as the hippocampus, drive the acquisition of recursion, while expert use of recursive rules relies on brain areas specialized for visual, musical, and motor processing (here for a review).

Crucially, linguistic encoding does not seem necessary for recursion in the visual domain.