Ce mémoire de maitrise décrit et explique l’émergence et l’essor de la recherche en neuromarketing. Ce domaine de recherche est apparu au début des années 2000 et s’attache à comprendre les comportements individuels de consommation en appliquant les théories et les techniques neuroscientifiques de mesure de l’activité neurobiologique aux questions du marketing. Objet controversé auquel des médias, des associations de consommateurs et certains neuromarketeurs accordent un pouvoir de persuasion exagéré alors qu’il est qualifié par de nombreux neuroscientifiques de fraude et de coup publicitaire, le neuromarketing est un domaine de recherche critiqué à la fois dans l’espace public et dans le champ académique. À partir de l’analyse bibliométrique des publications sur le neuromarketing, ce mémoire délimite les frontières mouvantes de ce domaine de recherche dont la définition de l’objet même est encore sujet de débat. À partir des travaux de Pierre Bourdieu sur le champ scientifique, ce mémoire de maitrise met en évidence les forces qui façonnent ce domaine de recherche, tant à l’intérieur qu’à l’extérieur du champ académique. Sur la base d’entretiens semi-directifs menés auprès d’agents de ce domaine de recherche, ce mémoire démontre que les neuromarketeurs doivent développer des stratégies discursives pour se distancier de l’image controversée du neuromarketing et adopter des stratégies de publication afin de diffuser leurs résultats de recherche dans le champ scientifique. Ce mémoire de maitrise démontre également que les neuromarketeurs dont l’habitus scientifique a été acquis en dehors du champ des sciences de la gestion doivent se surinvestir et faire des compromis épistémologiques et méthodologiques afin de s’ajuster aux pratiques de recherche en marketing. Ce mémoire établit ainsi que les chercheurs effectuent cette reconversion et s’investissent dans cette trajectoire professionnelle en raison des perspectives de carrière que le neuromarketing semble pouvoir offrir, tant dans le champ académique que dans le monde de l’entreprise. / This master’s thesis describes and explains the birth and rise of neuromarketing research. This area of research first appeared in the early 2000’s and aims to understand consumer behaviour by applying neuroscientific theories and methods of measuring neurobiological activity to marketing questions. As a controversial topic, neuromarketing is critized in both the public space and academia. Some members of the media, some consumer associations and some neuromarketers see neuromarketing as having an exaggerated power of persuasion while most neuroscientists qualify it as a scam or publicity stunt. Starting from bibliometric analysis of neuromarketing publications, this master’s thesis defines the shifting boundaries of this field of research whose subject itself is still opened to debate. Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the scientific field, this thesis highlights the forces that shape this speciality both in and out of the academic field. Based on semidirective interviews of agents working in this area of research, this thesis demonstrates that neuromarketers have to develop discursive strategies to distance themselves from the controversial image of neuromarketing and adopt publication strategies in order to disseminate the results of their research in the scientific field. This master’s thesis also reveals that neuromarketers who have acquired their scientific habitus outside the field of management sciences have to overinvest themselves and make both epistemological and methodological compromises in order to adapt to marketing research practices. Therefore, this thesis establishes that researchers who engage in this reconversion and invest themselves in this professional trajectory do so because of seemingly attractive career opportunities in neuromarketing research, in both the academic field and the business world.

The present thesis was concerned with the possible constraints set by visual and attentional pre-orthographical factors on visual word recognition in dyslexic individuals. In a first study, we investigated the visual word recognition ability of MT, a young boy with surface dyslexia, by means of a paradigm that measures performance as a function of the eye fixation position within the word, known as the "viewing position effect" paradigm. In well-achieving readers, the viewing position effect is mainly determined by factors affecting letter visibility and by lexical constraints on word recognition. We further quantified MT's sensory limitations on letter visibility by computing visual span profiles, i.e. the number of letters recognizable at a glance. Finally, in an ideal-observer's perspective, MT's performance was compared with a parameter-free model combining MT's letter visibility data with a simple lexical matching rule. The results showed that MT did not use the whole visual information available on letter identities to recognise words. These results can be best accounted for by a reduction of the number of letters processed in parallel. Accordingly, there is growing evidence that some dyslexic children suffer from a deficit in simultaneously processing of multiple visually displayed elements. The aim of the remaining studies was to investigate possible cognitive impairments at the source of the multi-element visual processing deficit in dyslexic children. A computational model of the attentional involvement in multi-object recognition [TVA: Bundesen, C. (1990). A theory of visual attention. Psychological Review, 97(4), 523--47] served as framework for this investigation. In a second study, we used TVA to investigate multi-element processing in two young dyslexic participants, AB and PA. By combining psychophysical measurements with computational modelling, we demonstrated that this multi-element processing deficit stems from two distinct cognitive sources: a reduction of the rate of visual information uptake, and a limitation of the visual short-term memory capacity. These deficits were replicated in a third study, in which the multi-element processing was investigated in three dyslexic individuals, FA, LT and YC. The last study further demonstrated that the multi-element processing deficit observed in dyslexia is not simply due to a sluggish activation of items names, instead of visual processing difficulties. Finally, the generalisability of the multi-element processing deficit has been assessed by comparing report performance of letters vs colour patches. Unfortunately, the results were inconclusive. Taken together, the results of these different studies point to a reduced capacity of processing visual information in parallel (at least for letters), that might constrain visual word recognition.

Les avancées de la biologie contemporaine, posent de façon nouvelle des problèmes philosophiques anciens. Ceux des rapports entre le vivant et l'inanimé, entre le corps et l'esprit, l'erreur et la vérité, sont les plus évidents. La philosophie de Spinoza, bien que datant du 17e siècle, apporte à ces problèmes des solutions plus pertinentes que la plupart des philosophies plus récentes, développées dans les siècles qui l'ont suivie. En retour, les acquis actuels des sciences physiques et biologiques, notamment des neurosciences cognitives, permettent de porter un nouveau regard sur certaines notions propres à la philosophie de Spinoza, telles que sa «petite physique», la nature cause de soi, la notion de matière, l'essence des choses, les genres de connaissance, qui acquièrent de ce fait un surcroît d'actualité. / Old philosophical problems are raised in renewed ways by advances in biology of today. Most obvious are the problems of relationship between living and non-living, mind and body, error en truth. Spinoza's philosophy, although from 17th century, offers solutions to these problems more relevant than most more recent philosophies. In return, present knowledge from physical and biological sciences, especially cognitive neurosciences, can provide a new look at some specifically Spinozist notions such as his "little physics", Nature as cause of itself, the notion of matter, the essence of a thing, kinds of knowledge, which gain all the more interest from a present day point of view.