What happens when our brain imagines music?

Dans des travaux précédents, les scientifiques avaient constaté que les attentes et les prédictions de notre cerveau concernant la musique jouaient un rôle clé dans la façon dont nous l'apprécions et la ressentons. En effet, pour chaque note entendue notre cerveau produit une réponse reflétant l’attente de l'auditeur, il produira une réponse neuronale moins importante pour les sons attendus et évidents que pour les sons compliqués et surprenants.

Redrawing the lines between language and graphics

Graphic and verbal communication are typically thought to work in very different ways. While speech uses a conventionalized vocabulary that is acquired from children’s environments, drawing is assumed to reflect the articulation of how people see and think, with learning based on “artistic talent.” Yet, research from linguistics and cognitive science upends these assumptions, suggesting that these domains are actually not so distinctive.

Contextual effects, image statistics, and deep learning

Neural responses and perception of visual inputs strongly depend on the spatial context, i.e., what surrounds a given object or feature. I will discuss our work on developing a visual cortical model based on the hypothesis that neurons represent inputs in a coordinate system that is matched to the statistical structure of images in the natural environment. The model generalizes a nonlinear computation known as normalization, that is ubiquitous in neural processing, and can capture some spatial context effects in cortical neurons.

Individual Differences in Lifespan Cognitive Development

This is an exciting time for scientists who are interested in cognitive development: there is now a wealth of easily-accessible data that can be used to ask interesting questions about how psychological, neural, and genetic factors affect changes in cognitive functions across the lifespan - and how they differ between individuals. In this talk, I'll describe several studies that apply individual-differences methods to large-scale, sometimes longitudinal datasets that include cognitive and biological information.

Topics in Tactile Cognition

Vincent Hayward is a Professor at Sorbonne Université (Paris, France), and a member of the Institute of Intelligent Systems and Robotics (ISIR). He is also Scientific Advisor to a start-up company which he co-founded, Actronika SAS, dedicated to lowering the accessibility barrier of haptic technology. Prior to his post at the Sorbonne, Vincent Hayward was at McGill University (Montréal, Canada), where he was a Professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering and Director of the McGill Centre for Intelligent Machines.