2011 Meeting of the European Mathematical Psychology Group (Paris)

The "2011 Meeting of the European Mathematical Psychology Group" will be held at the TELECOM ParisTech, August 29-31, 2011 (http://www.telecom-paristech.fr/eng/home.html).

The conference is organized by Irène Charon (Tèlècom ParisTech), Olivier Hudry (Tèlècom ParisTech and CNRS), Antoine Lobstein (CNRS and Tèlècom ParisTech) and Hayette Soussou (Tèlècom ParisTech). The Program has been elaborated by Professor Hudry and the plenary speakers will be T. Marchant ("Measurement theory with unary relations"), L. Stefanutti ("When the correspondence between probabilistic and set representations of local independence becomes a requirement: constant odds models for probabilistic knowledge structures"), D. Albert and C. Hockemeyer ("JCF´s impact is not limited to the foundation of the EMPG"), M. Raijmakers ("The application of latent Markov models in category learning"), J.-C. Falmagne ("Learning spaces in real life. How the large size of actual learning spaces guides the development of the theory"), C. Choirat ("Separable representations in mathematical psychology and decision making") and A. Diederich ("Optimal time windows: Modeling multisensory integration in saccadic reaction times").

In the parallel sessions, the author of this blog (C. Pelta) will started the morning sessions on Tuesday 30 August (10:30 h.) with his oral presentation entitled "Spatial prisoner´s dilemma and laws of imitation in Social Psychology". I design a game based on the spatial prisoner introducing the three laws of social imitation defined by Gabriel Tarde in his book Les lois de l´imitation (1890). The French author described (a) the law of close contact (individuals in close intimate contact with one another imitate each other´s behavior), (b) the law of imitation of superiors by inferiors (people follow the model of high status in hopes their behavior will procure the rewards associated with the "superior" class) and (c) the law of insertion (new behaviors reinforce or discourage previous customs). I run a computational simulation in which the formation of little "clusters" of cooperators supports not only the laws of Tarde but also the ideas of Sutherland which explain the imitation of deviance behavior as a process of communication within intimate personal groups or "differential association".

I predict that the Meeting will be a great success and that the organization will be very succesful. The readers of this blog are cordially invited to participate. On September it will be published in this blog a summary exposing the main ideas of this event to celebrate in Paris. For more information, please, see the webpage content designed by Professor Olivier Hudry (http://www.infres.enst.fr/~hudry/EMPG/).