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

Stanislas Dehaene Chaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentale Année 2025-2026 Collège de France Colloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain Theme: Space, Time, and Number The Perception and Understanding of Patterns and Graphics Colloque - Lorenzo Ciccione : The Perception and Understanding of Patterns and Graphics Lorenzo Ciccione Résumé Graphics 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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Colloque - Lorenzo Ciccione : The Perception and Understanding of Patterns and Graphics is an episode from Psychologie cognitive expérimentale by Collège de France.

This episode is 16:59 long.

This episode was published on Oct 3, 2025.

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