François Osiurak
Biographic Data
| ID | 191664 |
|---|---|
| NAME | François Osiurak |
| GIVEN NAMES | François |
| FAMILY NAME | Osiurak |
| SIGNATURE | OSIURAK F |
| AFFILIATIONS | Lyon 1 Université |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3449-6377 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 10 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 19 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2019 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 2 |
Growing Technological Opacity and the Social Brain
Thanks to our remarkable ability to transmit technical content, our technologies have become more sophisticated. Intuitively, one might assume that this evolution has imposed greater demands on the technical brain. However, recent neuroscientific research suggests that this evolution has also increasingly engaged the social brain to address the opacity it has generated in making, transactive, and use processes. Here, we build on these findings to…
Attention hijacked: How social media notifications disrupt cognitive processing
Approche neuropsychologique des relations entre corps, raisonnement technique et technologies
The Maghreb region has recently experienced a fertility decline, the pace and continuity of which has varied by country: Algeria and Tunisia have seen a rebound followed by further decline, and Morocco a steady fall. These trajectories reflect lasting changes in marriage, contraception, and family norms, against a socio-economic backdrop of prolonged education and later labour market entry. These countries are likely to be facing a sustained peri…
Media multitasking, interference management under uncertainty, and fluid intelligence: Indicators of performance and flexibility under chosen versus forced task interference
Comment les humains coopèrent-ils pour transmettre et améliorer leurs techniques
International audience
Rethinking causal understanding and reverse engineering through the lens of cultural ecology
Innovation rate and population structure moderate the effect of population size on cumulative technological culture
Cumulative technological culture is defined as the increase in efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques over generations that allowed humans to conquer the whole Earth. While one part of the puzzling ability of humans to develop such a form of culture lies in their cognitive capacities giving rise to reliable transmission of information, another lies in the impact of demographic factors. Indeed, many studies have examined the impact of p…
The Role of Explanation in the Evolution of Technology
One way to pass on our own causal understanding about how a physical system works is to provide a verbal explanation about it, raising the question of the role of explanations in the transmission and evolution of technology. Here we address this question by conducting new analyses on the data collected in 3 previously published microsociety studies, in which participants organized into transmission chains had to improve a technology. In 3 of the …
From stone tools to fMRI, studying human cognitive evolution when the mind doesn't fossilize
The visual encoding of graspable unfamiliar objects
Impact of technical reasoning and theory of mind on cumulative technological culture: Insights from a model of micro-societies
Our technologies have never ceased to evolve, allowing our lineage to expand its habitat all over the Earth, and even to explore space. This phenomenon, called cumulative technological culture (CTC), has been studied extensively, notably using mathematical and computational models. However, the cognitive capacities needed for the emergence and maintenance of CTC remain largely unknown. In the literature, the focus is put on the distinctive abilit…
Impact of Intrinsic Cognitive Skills and Metacognitive Beliefs on Tool Use Performance
Cognitive tools (e.g., calculators) provide all users with the same potential. Yet when people use such cognitive tools, interindividual variations are observed. Previous findings have indicated that 2 main factors could explain these variations: intrinsic cognitive skills (i.e., the “non–tool use” cognitive skills associated with the task targeted) and metacognitive beliefs about one's performance with tool use. In this study we sought to reprod…
Hazardous tools: The emergence of reasoning in human tool use
Humans are unique in the way they understand the causal relationships between the use of tools and achieving a goal. The idea at the core of the present research is that tool use can be considered as an instance of problem-solving situations supported by technical reasoning. In an eye-tracking study, we investigated the fixation patterns of participants (N = 32) looking at 3D images of thematically consistent (e.g., nail-steel hammer) and themati…
The Toolman effect: Preexisting non-tool-use experience improves subsequent tool-use performance
This study explores whether performing a cognitive task without using a tool (i.e., preexisting non-tool-use experience) impacts subsequent tool-use performance. Sixty participants moved an avatar within a maze in four directions (up, down, left, right). The keys were remapped 90° anticlockwise (e.g., the right key → upward). Therefore, the participants had to learn the mental-rotation-based perceptual-motor transformation to complete the path as…
Four ways of (mis-)conceiving embodiment in tool use
Technical reasoning is important for cumulative technological culture
Technition: When Tools Come Out of the Closet
People are ambivalently enthusiastic and anxious about how far technology can go. Therefore, understanding the neurocognitive bases of the human technical mind should be a major topic of the cognitive sciences. Surprisingly, however, scientists are not interested in this topic or address it only marginally in other mainstream domains (e.g., motor control, action observation, social cognition). In fact, this lack of interest may hinder our underst…
The Pedagogue, the Engineer, and the Friend: From Whom Do We Learn
Roles of Technical Reasoning, Theory of Mind, Creativity, and Fluid Cognition in Cumulative Technological Culture
Roles of Technical Reasoning, Theory of Mind, Creativity, and Fluid Cognition in Cumulative Technological Culture
Technition: When Tools Come Out of the Closet
People are ambivalently enthusiastic and anxious about how far technology can go. Therefore, understanding the neurocognitive bases of the human technical mind should be a major topic of the cognitive sciences. Surprisingly, however, scientists are not interested in this topic or address it only marginally in other mainstream domains (e.g., motor control, action observation, social cognition). In fact, this lack of interest may hinder our underst…
The Pedagogue, the Engineer, and the Friend: From Whom Do We Learn
Hazardous tools: The emergence of reasoning in human tool use
Humans are unique in the way they understand the causal relationships between the use of tools and achieving a goal. The idea at the core of the present research is that tool use can be considered as an instance of problem-solving situations supported by technical reasoning. In an eye-tracking study, we investigated the fixation patterns of participants (N = 32) looking at 3D images of thematically consistent (e.g., nail-steel hammer) and themati…
The Toolman effect: Preexisting non-tool-use experience improves subsequent tool-use performance
This study explores whether performing a cognitive task without using a tool (i.e., preexisting non-tool-use experience) impacts subsequent tool-use performance. Sixty participants moved an avatar within a maze in four directions (up, down, left, right). The keys were remapped 90° anticlockwise (e.g., the right key → upward). Therefore, the participants had to learn the mental-rotation-based perceptual-motor transformation to complete the path as…
Four ways of (mis-)conceiving embodiment in tool use
Technical reasoning is important for cumulative technological culture
Impact of technical reasoning and theory of mind on cumulative technological culture: Insights from a model of micro-societies
Our technologies have never ceased to evolve, allowing our lineage to expand its habitat all over the Earth, and even to explore space. This phenomenon, called cumulative technological culture (CTC), has been studied extensively, notably using mathematical and computational models. However, the cognitive capacities needed for the emergence and maintenance of CTC remain largely unknown. In the literature, the focus is put on the distinctive abilit…
Impact of Intrinsic Cognitive Skills and Metacognitive Beliefs on Tool Use Performance
Cognitive tools (e.g., calculators) provide all users with the same potential. Yet when people use such cognitive tools, interindividual variations are observed. Previous findings have indicated that 2 main factors could explain these variations: intrinsic cognitive skills (i.e., the “non–tool use” cognitive skills associated with the task targeted) and metacognitive beliefs about one's performance with tool use. In this study we sought to reprod…
The visual encoding of graspable unfamiliar objects
Innovation rate and population structure moderate the effect of population size on cumulative technological culture
Cumulative technological culture is defined as the increase in efficiency and complexity of tools and techniques over generations that allowed humans to conquer the whole Earth. While one part of the puzzling ability of humans to develop such a form of culture lies in their cognitive capacities giving rise to reliable transmission of information, another lies in the impact of demographic factors. Indeed, many studies have examined the impact of p…
The Role of Explanation in the Evolution of Technology
One way to pass on our own causal understanding about how a physical system works is to provide a verbal explanation about it, raising the question of the role of explanations in the transmission and evolution of technology. Here we address this question by conducting new analyses on the data collected in 3 previously published microsociety studies, in which participants organized into transmission chains had to improve a technology. In 3 of the …
From stone tools to fMRI, studying human cognitive evolution when the mind doesn't fossilize
Media multitasking, interference management under uncertainty, and fluid intelligence: Indicators of performance and flexibility under chosen versus forced task interference
Comment les humains coopèrent-ils pour transmettre et améliorer leurs techniques
International audience
Rethinking causal understanding and reverse engineering through the lens of cultural ecology
Growing Technological Opacity and the Social Brain
Thanks to our remarkable ability to transmit technical content, our technologies have become more sophisticated. Intuitively, one might assume that this evolution has imposed greater demands on the technical brain. However, recent neuroscientific research suggests that this evolution has also increasingly engaged the social brain to address the opacity it has generated in making, transactive, and use processes. Here, we build on these findings to…
Attention hijacked: How social media notifications disrupt cognitive processing
Approche neuropsychologique des relations entre corps, raisonnement technique et technologies
The Maghreb region has recently experienced a fertility decline, the pace and continuity of which has varied by country: Algeria and Tunisia have seen a rebound followed by further decline, and Morocco a steady fall. These trajectories reflect lasting changes in marriage, contraception, and family norms, against a socio-economic backdrop of prolonged education and later labour market entry. These countries are likely to be facing a sustained peri…
Psychology (12 works) · Cognition (11 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (8 works) · Language and cultural evolution (8 works) · Action Observation and Synchronization (7 works) · Computer Science (7 works) · Cognitive science (6 works) · Evolutionary Game Theory and Cooperation (5 works) · Neuroscience (5 works)