Social categorization is one of the most fundamental mechanisms identified in social psychology. When facing a person, rather than considering her or him in terms of her or his unique characteristics, we instead consider the person based on the social categories to which she or he belongs or, more precisely, to which we think he or she belongs. However, an important question remains largely unresolved: How does social categorization operate when multiple sources of social information, such as gender, ethnicity, age, occupation, etc. are simultaneously available?

During conversation, our brains are constantly predicting which word comes next. That ability helps us understand speech in a noisy café, or anticipate a friend’s next sentence. This skill for prediction is also linked closely to our enjoyment of music.

For Professor Shihab Shamma, an auditory neuroscientist at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris and the University of Maryland in the US, understanding how the brain processes music is a central research question.

This workshop brings together researchers to discuss topics on Confidence and decision-making, including confidence and value, confidence in action, complex mechanisms, and computations.

SPEAKERS

Metacognition, the ability to think about our own thoughts and mental processes, enables us to self-evaluate our decisions and feel more or less confident in our choices. Even the most basic decisions, about what we see, come with a feeling of confidence. The study of perceptual confidence enables tight experimental control of the underlying information used to form feelings of confidence, and probes the depth of our self-insight.

How the brain consolidates auditory memories during sleep remains poorly understood. A key open question is whether the hippocampus contributes to this process via sharp-wave ripple (SWR) events, the fast oscillatory sequences that drive memory replay in spatial tasks, or whether auditory cortex operates through distinct, cortex-intrinsic mechanisms. Addressing this question requires combining large-scale recordings across the auditory system and hippocampus with reliable vigilance-state monitoring.

Sleep is not a uniform state: it is organized into structured cycles of substages (wakefulness, NREM, and REM sleep) whose dynamics are shaped by both internal brain processes and external experience. How social context influences these transitions remains largely unexplored, particularly in carnivores whose sleep architecture more closely resembles that of humans than rodents. The ferret, a highly social species with a well-characterized auditory cortex and an extended postnatal development, offers a compelling model in which to address these questions.

The ability to perceive and categorize speech sounds develops early in life, well before language acquisition. The neural mechanisms underlying this early plasticity, and in particular the role of auditory experience in shaping the maturation of auditory cortical areas, remain poorly understood. Our group addresses these questions using the ferret as an animal model, whose protracted postnatal brain development makes it especially well suited for experimental investigation.

Enregistrement d'une rivière Corse

L’originalité de cette étude tient à la méthodologie mise en œuvre pour analyser la rivière de Haute-Corse, la Bravone. Pourquoi la Corse ? Parce que ce territoire insulaire présente un trafic aérien beaucoup plus faible que la France métropolitaine, et donc, un moindre niveau de pollution acoustique d’origine humaine.

Le projet fUSI vise à améliorer la manière dont on détecte et comprend les troubles du développement cérébral, tels que l'autisme et la schizophrénie, dès le début de la vie. Actuellement, beaucoup de ces troubles ne sont pas identifiés avant que les symptômes ne deviennent plus évidents et plus difficiles à traiter.