Colloque - Lorenzo Ciccione : The Perception and Understanding of Patterns and Graphics

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Space, Time, and NumberThe Perception and Understanding of Patterns and GraphicsColloque - Lorenzo Ciccione : The Perception and Understanding of Patterns and GraphicsLorenzo CiccioneRésuméGraphics are a cultural product, meaning that they are a human invention with defined rules and syntax. In this respect, they are very similar to written words and numbers, probably the two most famous cultural inventions. However, unlike them, graphics have been invented much more recently and they became widespread only in the last two centuries. Furthermore, graphicacy—the ability to read and understand graphics—has received little attention from cognitive psychology. In this talk, I will present some findings about the human ability to intuitively extract statistics and mathematical relations from graphical representations. Specifically, I will show that: graphics' intuitions are available early on in development, independently from formal education, and correlate with statistical and mathematical knowledge; judging the trends of noisy graphical displays recycles brain areas usually devoted to the detection of objects' orientation (in agreement with the neuronal recycling hypothesis) and also activates the brain network for mathematics; both children and adults can extrapolate non-linear mathematical patterns, with the notable exception of quadratic and exponential functions.

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