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This review essay examines relationships between animal advocates and veterinarians in France from the nineteenth century onwards. Due to their role as activists or professionals, they are studied independently of each other. Despite the disagreements that may have arisen between them, both groups claim to have animals’ interests at heart and share many common concerns regarding the animal condition. Based on a secondary analysis of the literature on animal advocates and veterinarians, we examine the existence and form of relationships between these two social groups. We identify four types of intersection that allow us to account for the existence of multiple relationships between animal advocates and veterinarians. The initial understanding between animal advocates and veterinarians in the middle of the nineteenth century gave way to a situation of conflict and competition beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. In the middle of the twentieth century, renewed debates on the animal condition and animal husbandry gave rise to the development of ambiguous relationships between veterinarians concerned about health issues and animal advocates who were divided into “welfarists” and “animal rights advocates”. In this respect, the discovery of the intersecting history of animal advocates and veterinarians emphasises the multi-dimensional nature of their relationships, which has fluctuated between cooperation and competition.

Since reasoning is often biased by intuitive heuristics, the development of sound reasoning has long been postulated to depend on successful bias monitoring and inhibition. The present fMRI study aimed to identify neural correlates of developmental changes in these processes. A group of adults and young adolescents were presented with ratio-bias problems in which an intuitively cued heuristic response could be incongruent (conflict item) or congruent (no-conflict item) with the correct response. Results showed that successfully avoiding biased responding on conflict items across both age groups was associated with increased activation in Anterior Cingulate Cortex (ACC) and the right Lateral Prefrontal Cortex (LPFC) regions of interest. Critically, the right LPFC activation decreased with age. Biased responding did not result in right LPFC or ACC modulation and failed to show any developmental activation changes. We discuss implications for ongoing debates on the nature of heuristic bias and its development.

Human reasoning is often biased by heuristic thinking. A key question is whether people detect that their heuristic answer conflicts with logical considerations. Empirical studies suggest that the detection is typically successful but the generality of these findings has been questioned. The present study focuses on this issue. A response confidence measure was used to validate conflict sensitivity findings in the classical ratio bias task and identify individual differences in conflict detection efficiency. Participants were asked to indicate how confident they were after solving problems for which a cued heuristic response could be inconsistent or consistent with the correct response. Results confirmed that most reasoners showed a confidence decrease when they were biased, suggesting that they acknowledge that their intuitive answers are not fully warranted. However, there were also subgroups of reasoners who failed to show a confidence effect. Implications for the debate on conflict detection during thinking are discussed.

There are obstacles to creativity: one of them is called fixation effect, the fact that some knowledge about existing or obvious solutions is spontaneously activated and constrains the generation of new solutions. Converging evidence in cognitive psychology has indicated that the ability to generate original ideas can be limited by recently activated knowledge, such as examples of solutions. On the other hand, neuroimaging studies have recently demonstrated that exposure to examples could, on the contrary, have a stimulating effect on originality. To make sense of what seems to be contradictory studies, we hypothesized that two types of examples could have opposite effects on originality: (1) restrictive examples—within the fixation effect—could lead to a reduction in the originality of the solutions, whereas (2) expansive examples—outside the fixation effect—could provoke solutions of higher originality. Results from a total of 160 participants confirmed that the solutions proposed by the group exposed to restrictive examples were less original than those given by the group exposed to expansive examples.

The visual environment consists of global structures (e.g., a forest) made up of local parts (e.g., trees). When compound stimuli are presented (e.g., large global letters composed of arrangements of small local letters), the global unattended information slows responses to local targets. Using a negative priming paradigm, we investigated whether inhibition is required to process hierarchical stimuli when information at the local level is in conflict with the one at the global level. The results show that when local and global information is in conflict, global information must be inhibited to process local information, but that the reverse is not true. This finding has potential direct implications for brain models of visual recognition, by suggesting that when local information is conflicting with global information, inhibitory control reduces feedback activity from global information (e.g., inhibits the forest) which allows the visual system to process local information (e.g., to focus attention on a particular tree).

This study investigated the influence of egocentric and allocentric viewpoints on a comparison task of length estimation in children and adults. A total of 100 participants ranging in age from 5 years to adulthood were presented with virtual scenes representing a park landscape with two paths, one straight and one serpentine. Scenes were presented either from an egocentric or allocentric viewpoint. Results showed that when the two paths had the same length, participants always overestimated the length of the straight line for allocentric trials, whereas a development from a systematic overestimation in children to an underestimation of the straight line length in adults was found for egocentric trials. We discuss these findings in terms of the influences of both bias-inhibition processes and school acquisitions.

Previous studies have provided evidence of interference due to a language-default mode (i.e., the singular/plural opposition) in 2-year-old children when solving arithmetic problems using a traditional onlooker method. However, an action-based method could help to bypass this language bias. In particular, when an arithmetic problem is presented to the children by the experimenter (onlooker mode) or realized by the children themselves (actor mode), performances are better with the latter. Thus, an experimental procedure based on “math in action” allows a brain-and-mind shift from a global language-bias (singular/plural) strategy to an exact numerical strategy. In this framework, we examined whether the exact numerical strategy induced by the actor method remains operational when children had to subsequently solve the same arithmetic problem using the traditional onlooker method. Results from 112 children suggest that this pedagogical effect of action bypasses the interference from language in onlooker mode after an initial confrontation of the problem in actor mode. This enduring embodiment effect has important implications for cognitive and preschool assessment in toddlers.

Numerous studies have demonstrated that the well-known global precedence effect, characterized by a visual bias toward global information, is highly dependent on stimulus characteristics (Kimchi, 1992). Despite the extensive global-local literature, few studies have investigated how interindividual characteristics could affect the global precedence effect. In this framework, we studied the relationship between global-local visual biases and the Group Embedded Figure Test (GEFT), a standardized measure of field dependency. Data from 34 participants were consistent with the idea that an individual’s bias toward the global level is linearly related to his or her degree of field dependence. Given the important role that global-local visual skills play during visuospatial tasks, these results have important implications for future research in this area.