SEARCH ADVISORY: "Nounours" fearsomely comforting at the UM
There are nine of them, biologists, ecologists, psychologists, computer scientists and scientific mediators at the University of Montpellier. They were chosen by the Nuit des Chercheurs jury to lead the Grande Expérience Participative (GEP), which took place on September 27, 2019.
Their mission: to draw up a profile of the most comforting teddy bear in France.
The individual is a teddy bear. He could be present in one of the twelve towns taking part in the Nuit des Chercheurs on September 27. The public is advised to remain on their guard: the suspect could be dangerously comforting. Since last April, nine scientists at the University of Montpellier have been working in total secrecy on an infallible plan to identify and confound the presumed culprit, with the help of the general public.
Elite researchers mobilized
It all started with Thierry Brassac. A scientific mediator at the University of Montpellier, in 2010 he set up his first exhibition on biodiversity, featuring stuffed animals. Fascinated by these little creatures, he never looked back, even going so far as to teach this soft science in the Master's program in science mediation at the University of Montpellier. " You either love peluchology or you don't, but one thing's for sure: scientifically speaking, it only works if you take it very seriously," he warns. An expert in the art of classifying teddy bears, he is the coordinator of this project.
To nail the teddy bear, Thierry Brassac assembled a multi-disciplinary team. " At the time, Nicolas Mouquet was working on the aesthetics of fish, and when I talked to him about the sketchbook, he suggested that I classify teddy bears by morphological characteristics, along the lines of the natural sciences," explains the mediator. Renowned for his work on the mechanisms of emergence and maintenance of diversity, Nicolas Mouquet is also Scientific Director of the Centre de synthèse et d'analyse sur la biodiversité (CESAB) in Montpellier. He was joined by Anne-Sophie Tribot, an ecologist and biologist, who oversaw the development of the protocol. Their objective: to identify the morphological profile of the suspect and its comforting power.
The third pillar of this elite team is Nathalie Blanc. Deputy director of the EPSYLON cognitive psychology laboratory, her in-depth knowledge of the development of emotional knowledge in children will enable her to better understand the teddy bear's modus operandi for seducing his victims. They are joined by Michel Raymond, an evolutionary biologist at theInstitut des Sciences de l'Evolution de Montpellier (ISEM), François Guilhaumon, a research fellow atIRD, Nicolas Casajus, an eco-informatician at CESAB, Moad Essabbar, a doctoral student in electronics, and Christopher Sevin, a student in scientific mediation at the University of Montpellier.
The Great Participatory Experience
Selected last April by a jury made up of scientific mediators and researchers, this research project will be at the heart of the Grande Expérience Participative (GEP) taking place on September 27 as part of the 15th Nuit des Chercheurs. Members of the public expected in the 12 organizing cities are invited to collaborate by bringing along their favourite bear. Over the course of the evening, researchers will photograph the little specimens and put them through a battery of tests to establish a precise descriptive file. Participants need not worry about their precious teddy bear: " They will be reunited with their owner after the tests. No harm will come to them," says Thierry Brassac.
Then it's their master's turn to answer a series of questions devised by Nathalie Blanc. The aim: to study the subjective relationship we build up with these objects, and in particular the notion of comfort. " We ask participants to compare their bear with eight other plush specimens and tell us whether they find it more or less pleasant to look at, more or less soft..." describes the mediator.
A protocol that's no dummy
Although "baby" in appearance, setting up such an experimental protocol required meticulous preparation. Starting with the choice of relevant criteria: size of head, body or eyes, roundness, posture of the teddy bear, clothing accessories, internal mechanisms (lights, sound devices, etc.), length and softness of the hair... Everything went through it! Other criteria, such as softness, had to be abandoned as too complicated to measure.
Another difficulty is ensuring that observations are reproduced everywhere under the same conditions. When it comes to color, for example, it's difficult to be satisfied with a simple black, beige or yellow comment, which could leave too much room for subjectivity. To quantify hue as accurately as possible, Anne-Sophie Tribot worked with Montpellier biophysicist Frédéric Geniet to develop a colorimetric test chart. " It took a lot of work to make it, but also to print it, because we had to make sure that each city would work with the same colors," explains Thierry Brassac.
The creation of the control sample also represented a challenge for the team, who had to deal with purely practical constraints this time: " we had to find a supplier able to deliver twelve of each teddy bear, so that each participating town would have the same sample". After a number of unsuccessful attempts to find a retailer, it was finally Montpellier's historic toy store, Pomme de reinette et pomme d'Api, that met the researchers' demand.
The bear, a totem animal
This "Grande Expérience Participative" (Great Participatory Experience) is a continuation of the work carried out by the Scientific Culture Department of the University of Montpellier over many years, and in particular the exhibition " From the cave bear to the teddy bear". " What interests us is the imaginary part of the bear, its representation in our subconscious. The bear has had a very strong symbolic value since prehistoric times, and is the totem animal par excellence in Western societies," concludes Thierry Brassac.
The researchers still have a lot of work ahead of them to get everything ready for September 27. A website accessible to the public will then be dedicated to data processing and analysis. The result will be a set of carefully collected data that can be analyzed using bioinformatics tools to define the profile of France's most comforting teddy bear, and... perhaps a scientific publication?
Researchers' Night, September 27, 2019
In Toulouse-Albi, Marseille, Bordeaux, Limoges, St-Etienne, Angers, Le Mans, Brest, Dijon, Besançon, Paris, St-Denis de la Réunion