Noise control is an integral part of acoustics engineering and a concern for modern society. For example, the EU Action Plan: 'Towards Zero Pollution for Air, Water, and Soil' aims to reduce the share of people chronically disturbed by transport noise by 30%. However, wave control is normally constrained by the physical and geometrical properties of the materials. The recent concept of active metasurfaces made from acoustic metamaterials is opening new horizons for sound control applications, as the properties of these metasurfaces can be modified to achieve the desired acoustic behaviour and can be tailored to specific applications. A metasurface that could adapt itself both in space and time, i.e., spatiotemporal modulation, based on the wavefield could open new possibilities for controlling sound in real time. However, implementing this type of metasurface still presents significant challenges due to experimental difficulties and control algorithm limitations. This project addresses these challenges by proposing an acoustic metasurface composed of individual electroacoustic absorbers that can be controlled with a pressure-current-based control system. Therefore, INTSURFACE research aims to develop a real-time adaptive metasurface with spatiotemporal modulation capabilities. During this project, the theoretical and numerical frameworks to evaluate metasurfaces will be expanded to include space-time dependent properties and allow for the prediction of their acoustic behaviour in practical scenarios. Then, to control the metasurface, the research will develop a machine learning control framework that can adapt the individual elements of the metasurface to implement a desired spatiotemporal configuration. Finally, a proof-of-concept acoustic metasurface will be built and tested in several practical applications, including non-reciprocal multiple frequency propagation, multi-rainbow trapping, and cloaking by sound cancelation.

The main goal of this proposal, to propose self-adaptive thermal regulation systems that are smart, green, aesthetically pleasing and engineering applicable, is in line with the RePowerEU plan that efforts in saving energy and decarbonising heat. In this project, new thermal metamaterials are designed that integrates smart radiative cooling, high solar reflectance and customized colour, a multi-function design not previously available. Utilizing the metal-insulator transition of phase changing materials, the thermal metamaterial adapts its thermal emissivity smartly to different ambient temperatures, thus intelligently switching between “on cooling” mode in hot times and “off cooling” mode in cold times, which benefits creating comfortable household conditions and contributing to energy saving from an all-season perspective. Besdies, the thermal metamaterial can present vivid colours to satisfy aesthetic needs. Considering that thermally induced deformation can lead to structural failure of designed thermal metamaterials and affect their working life, mechanical robustness is also considered for scalable production and for real-world applications. A new inverse method is developed to accurately predict the structural deformation by eigenstrain reconstruction. On basis of this, mechanical stability strategy is proposed to eliminate the deformation, which pushes the smart regulation system closer to real-world application. The proposed design is estimated to save at least 134 €/year for a single family in Besançon, Franche-Comté, France. The resulted energy savings not only bring economic benefits but also contribute to environmental preservation and climate change suppression by reducing greenhouse gas emissions. This project can create significant impact in household energy saving and industrial heat management sectors.

Magicians often trick spectators’ mind by relying on cognitive limitations. Recently, research in psychology has studied the processes at play in magic. The goal of these studies is not only to gain new insight on known cognitive processes but also to uncover those yet unexplored. Although the range of psychological biases associated with magic is vast, most of them rely on a certain exploitation of participants’ prior expectation in order to manipulate their low-level (perceptual) and high-level (problem solving) reasoning processes. The aim of the present project is to investigate the mechanisms at play in three cognitive biases commonly manipulated by magicians and relying on participants’ prior expectations: the mind-fixing effect, motion extrapolation and attribute substitution. Studying the cognitive processes manipulated by magicians should lead to major advances in the fields of low-level and high-level reasoning. The aim of this first work package of our project is to better understand the mechanisms at play in the mind-fixing effect by studying the influence of two main factors closely linked to participants’ expectations: the credibility of the source and the level of insight linked with the activation of a false/wrong solution. The aim of the second work package is to understand the specificity of the motion extrapolation involved in a famous perceptual illusion: the Vanishing Ball Illusion (VBI). Although a considerable number of studies have investigated how individual and contextual factors (e.g., participants’ expectations, participant’s age, allocated attention…) affect participants’ motion extrapolation in the widely studied representational momentum (RM), none have yet investigated the specific influence of these factors on the VBI. However, the VBI seems to rely on mechanisms that are independent from those involved in RM tasks. The aim of the third work package is to better understand the mechanisms at play in perceptual attribute substitution error. More specifically, we aim to evaluate its degree of cognitive impenetrability, to better understand the generic aspect of this perceptual attribute substitution and to investigate the role of individual differences such as ambiguity tolerance. Improving our understanding of these low-level and high-level reasoning biases, and notably the influence of prior expectations, could be beneficial in many areas where intuitive errors can have major consequences, such as road safety or aeronautics. Moreover, this could shed theoretical new lights on these yet poorly studied biases.

How do we translate information from sensory inputs and memory stores into goal-directed actions? In the last 40 years, the fields of cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience have focused on the decision-making stage, and very few attempts have been made to understand the complete process. The aim of the present scientific proposal is to elaborate an integrated computational theory of deciding and acting in humans, which explains conflicting measurements from these traditionally separate fields of research, and provides joint, precise quantitative predictions about them. The core hypothesis of the theory is that motor execution is determined by the same evidence accumulation variable that drives decision-making. This hypothesis strongly departs from current models of decision-making that represent motor execution as a residual parameter, under the assumption that motor execution captures effects that are not cognitively interesting. The theory will be tested through a series of experiments that combine cognitive modeling, behavioral and electrophysiological measurements (electromyography of response-relevant muscles and electroencephalography). Specifically, the experiments aim at (i) testing and characterizing the hypothetical dependency of motor execution to the evolving decision variable, (ii) generalizing the theory to a wide range of choice laboratory tasks and different response effectors, (iii) identifying potential boundary conditions of application, and (iv) elucidating the relationship between decision-making, motor execution, and confidence judgments. In a final part of the project, the theory will be applied to developmental data, in order to provide new theoretical insight into the development of decision-making and motor execution across the lifespan. If successful, this work should provide new perspectives into a broader range of research problems, from perception-action coupling to movement disorders that appear to have a cognitive basis.

While numerous studies have been conducted to understand how humans efficiently search for a single visual target among multiple distractors in the visual environment, studies involving search, or foraging, for multiple targets are far fewer. However, this situation is much more prevalent in everyday life, and gaining insights into the mechanisms of human visual foraging could yield important new findings for basic research in cognitive psychology of attention. Additionally, this could have significant impact for applied research, particularly in the field of education. Critically, understanding the development of visual foraging abilities during childhood is a major concern, especially in educational context where pupils require guidance when foraging in the classroom for relevant information to complete academic tasks. This research project is led by Dr. Jérôme Tagu and aims to 1/ identify the factors leading to efficient visual foraging, 2/ examine how these factors develop during childhood, and 3/ apply this knowledge to the field of education. It involves experiments conducted in laboratory, ecologically-valid and real-world conditions, with adult and school-age child participants. The examination of oculomotor behaviour and individual differences will help identifying efficient foraging strategies and will provide detailed information about the mechanisms of target selection during visual foraging. Altogether, in three work packages, the MULTIFOR project will provide 1/ new and important insights into the mechanisms of human visual foraging and their development during childhood, and 2/ critical practical information about foraging abilities of pupils during learning.