La compréhension des effets cérébraux sous-tendant l’impact de la stimulation magnétique transcrânienne répétée (rTMS) est un a priori nécessaire à la connaissance de la prise en charge thérapeutique des patients bénéficiant de ces traitements. A posteriori, elle permet en plus de comprendre les processus physiopathologiques responsables des symptômes cliniques propres aux troubles mentaux. Nous nous sommes ici intéressés aux effets de la rTMS sur le cerveau des patients souffrant de schizophrénie (SZ), au travers des deux principes fondamentaux du fonctionnement cérébral que sont la ségrégation et l’intégration fonctionnelle. En premier lieu, nous avons analysé l’effet de la rTMS visant le cortex préfrontal médian (CPM) sur le principe de ségrégation fonctionnelle chez des SZ avec trouble de la cognition sociale. Pour ce faire nous avons développé un paradigme d’imagerie par résonance magnétique fonctionnelle (IRMf) écologique et novateur de cognition sociale. Un prérequis aux études longitudinales en IRMf est la reproductibilité du signal d’activation. Nous avons alors démontré la fiabilité de notre paradigme entre deux sessions, puis à l’aide de ce paradigme, nous avons étudié l’effet de la rTMS sur la ségrégation à partir de la variation du signal BOLD et des taux de N-AcetylAspartate et de glutamate. Puis nous avons étudié l’impact de la rTMS ciblant le sillon temporal supérieur gauche (STSg) sur les hallucinations auditivo-verbales (AVH) en termes de connectivité fonctionnelle statique (intégration fonctionnelle). Nous avons ainsi mis en évidence l’effet bénéfique de la rTMS sur le trouble de cognition sociale et sur les AVH. En outre, quand la rTMS cible le STSg, il ne semble pas avoir d’effet sur la connectivité fonctionnelle statique du réseau cérébral du langage observé. Cependant, focalisé au niveau du CPM, elle permettrait d’augmenter la concentration de N-acétylaspartate des SZ. L’absence d’effet de la rTMS illustrerait plutôt des profils d’organisation cérébrale différents des SZ, et ce par des variabilités interindividuelles, suggérant qu’il serait à l’avenir bénéfique de déterminer les caractéristiques optimales de la stimulation sur une base individuelle afin de mieux moduler les processus anormaux du cerveau dans les schizophrénies. / The understanding of the brain effects underlying the impact of repeated transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) is a necessary a priori necessary concerning patients treatments. A posteriori, it also helps to understand the pathophysiological processes responsible for the clinical symptoms of mental disorders. Hither, we are interested in the effects of rTMS on the brain of patients with schizophrenia (SZ), through the two fundamental principles of cerebral functioning: segregation and functional integration. First, we have analyzed the effect of rTMS on the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) according to functional segregation in SZ with social cognition disorder. To do this we have developed an ecological and innovative social cognition paradigm for functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). A prerequisite for longitudinal studies in fMRI is the reproducibility of the activation signal, we have then demonstrated the reliability of our paradigm between two sessions. Using this paradigm, we have studied the effect of rTMS on segregation from the variation of the BOLD signal and the levels of N-Acetyl Aspartate and glutamate. Then, we studied the impact of rTMS targeting the left temporal sulcus (STS) on auditory-verbal hallucinations (AVH) in terms of functional connectivity (functional integration). We have thus demonstrated the beneficial effect of rTMS on social cognition disorder and on AVH. Moreover, when the rTMS targets the STS, it does not seem to have an effect on the static functional connectivity within the listening language network. However, focused on the MPFC, it would increase the N-acetylaspartate concentration of SZ. The absence of the effect of the rTMS would rather illustrate different brain organization patterns of the SZ, due to inter-individual variability, suggesting that it would be in the future beneficial to determine optimal characteristics of stimulation on an individual basis in order to best modulate abnormal processes of the brain in schizophrenias.

Theory of Mind (ToM) is the ability to infer mental states of others and this skill relies on a distributed network of brain regions. A brain region that has been traditionally disregarded in relation to non-motor functions is the cerebellum. Here, we leveraged large-scale multimodal neuroimaging data to elucidate the structural and functional role of the cerebellum in ToM. We used functional activations to determine whether the cerebellum has a domain-general or domain-specific functional role. We found that the cerebellum is organized in a domain-specific way. We used effective connectivity and probabilistic tractography to map the cerebello-cerebral ToM network. We found a left cerebellar effective and structural lateralization, with more and stronger effective connections from the left cerebellar hemisphere to the contralateral cerebral ToM areas and greater cerebello-thalamo-cortical (CTC) and cortico-ponto-cerebellar (CPC) streamline counts from and to the left cerebellum. Lastly, we examined the relationship between CTC and CPC white matter and ToM speed and accuracy but found no correlation. Our study provides novel insights to the network organization of the cerebellum, an overlooked brain structure, and ToM, one of humans’ most essential abilities to navigate the social world. / Psychology

Although the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution grants American citizenship to any person born or naturalized in this country, subjective perceptions of who belongs in the country are driven by default assumptions that the prototypical American is White. This belief that Whites are somehow more American than members of other ethnic groups lies in sharp contrast to the widespread endorsement of multiculturalism in everyday life. Two studies provide evidence that these race-based beliefs about the prototypical American can produce discriminatory behavior against ethnic minorities in domains where patriotism is relevant, but not in domains where patriotism is irrelevant. Study 1 demonstrated that the more participants believe that the prototypical American is White, the less willing they are to hire highly qualified Asian Americans in national security jobs where patriotism is essential. Additionally, this effect was partially mediated by doubts about Asian Americans’ loyalty to thee country. Study 2 replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating that the more participants believe that the prototypical American is White, the less willing they are to hire highly qualified Asian Americans in national security jobs, but not in private business jobs where patriotism is irrelevant. Together, these studies demonstrate how race-based beliefs about the prototypical American can lead to discriminatory behavior against ethnic minorities, particularly in domains where national loyalty is important.

Thesis advisor: Katherine McAuliffe / Thesis advisor: Angela Johnston / Human cooperation is unparalleled in the natural world and is a defining feature of human social life—it shapes nearly every social interaction we experience, from geopolitical conflict, to collective bargaining, to team collaboration. However, cooperation also presents a challenge—it is often personally costly or risky to cooperate. How are humans able to overcome these costs and risks in favor of the interest of the group? To address this question, it is important to investigate the cognitive abilities that allow us to successfully cooperate with others. One important ability for cooperation is mentalizing—the ability to represent other agents’ beliefs, knowledge, desires, and intentions. The ability to think about other agents’ minds in order to predict how they will behave (e.g., whether they will cooperate or free-ride) is an important component of our own cooperative behavior, particularly in the context of coordination—a type of cooperative interaction where cooperation is mutually beneficial but risky. I test the idea that our ability to represent the beliefs of others plays a critical role in successful cooperation. Studies 1 and 2 examine one cognitive ability for representing others’ knowledge—common knowledge—that underlies cooperation by reducing uncertainty about others’ cooperative behavior. Studies 3 and 4 investigate how we make inferences about others’ beliefs from how they behave and how that influences our own cooperative behavior in the context of social norms. Studies 2 and 4 take a developmental approach to investigate how early emerging mentalizing is for cooperative behavior to better understand how foundational it is in social cognition. Altogether, the results of these studies suggest that the ability to represent other agents’ beliefs in order to predict their behavior plays a fundamental role in supporting successful cooperation. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2023. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

While there is a large amount of literature on the socio-cognitive theory of technology evolution, most has focused on the interpretations of technologies that are already in existence. The literature has barely attended to the role of forward-looking cognition—mental representations of possibilities in the future. How do innovators and entrepreneurs envision the possible, and how do they translate those abstract concepts into new material and social reality? This dissertation first synthesizes the vast literature on technology evolution, and offers a theoretical framework for understanding the role of forward-looking cognition in the evolution of technology. Using a large amount of historical archival data on the US robotics industry, my two empirical papers investigate (a) how a distant vision co-evolves with the actual technologies at the level of the organizational field (b) how entrepreneurial solutions and entrepreneurial search problems are co-constructed at the firm level. In the first paper of my dissertation, I review the literature on the evolution of technology. Over the last decades, scholars from a broad range of theoretical and methodological traditions have generated a vast yet dispersed body of literature on technology evolution. This essay offers a comprehensive synthesis of the major streams of scholarship on technology evolution by dividing the literature into four perspectives: technology realist, economic realist, cognitive interpretivist, and social constructionist. I further show that each perspective offers a divergent account of three central mechanisms—variation, selection, and retention—that drive discrete, continuous, and cyclical patterns of technology evolution. I integrate these perspectives by highlighting that they all emphasize recombination, environmental fit, and path dependence as central drivers of those three mechanisms. I emphasize the need for a co-evolutionary framework that cuts across the four perspectives to push the literature forward. In the second paper of my dissertation, I examine how technological visions—mental representations of technological possibilities in the future—co-evolve with the actual technologies. This paper is set in the robotics industry. The existing literature has focused on how backward-looking interpretations of technology shape its subsequent trajectory, but has rarely examined the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. To examine this, I conducted an extensive archival qualitative study covering the evolution of the field of robotics during the 100-year period from 1921 to 2020. I find that in a future-oriented field, the direction of technology evolution is largely shaped by the field participants’ attempts to narrow the vision-reality gap—the perceived temporal gap between the distant vision and present reality. I identify six distinct mechanisms—linking means to the distant vision, constructing a medium-term vision, envisioning sequences, decomposing, reconstructing, and reintegrating—through which field participants strive to narrow the vision-reality gap. I also find that the vision-reality gap is extremely volatile, and can rapidly expand and contract when salient artifacts (or reverse salients) emerge. In this study, I contribute to the socio-cognitive view of technology by highlighting the role of forward-looking cognition in technology evolution. In the third paper of the dissertation, I study the process through which an entrepreneurial search problem is constructed. Previous studies have focused on search for solutions to a given problem. However, literature on entrepreneurship suggests that many entrepreneurs often start from formulating a very broad, abstract problem that a novel technological means is envisioned to be able to solve in the future. Forward-looking cognition, the mental representations of possibilities in the future, lies behind the process of problem formulation. In order to examine how construction of problems affects search for solutions, I conducted a qualitative analysis of archival data about 58 entrepreneurial firms founded by 42 entrepreneurs in the robotics industry. I find that most entrepreneurial firms start by linking a novel technological means to an abstract problem, and then proactively identify a core constraint in the solution space. In order to bypass the constraint, they engage in decomposing and reconstructing a core problem. In the stage of pursuing product-market fit, the issue of identifying core attributes, or core evaluation criteria weighted by users is brought to the fore. This paper contributes to our understandings of entrepreneurial search by highlighting the cognitive underpinnings of problem formulation.