Abstract: Auditory-vocal communication requires the coordinated
development of sensory and motor circuits around sounds that convey
social information. When communication sounds are learned, the brain
must use experience to build auditory and vocal motor circuits that
are functionally coupled to perceive and produce the same acoustic
signals. Unlike other animals, humans and songbirds learn the
vocalizations they use to communicate. Behavioral studies of speech
and song perception suggest that early vocal learning shapes auditory

The pupil is primarily regulated by prevailing light levels, but is also modulated by perceptual and attentional factors. We have investigated multiple cases where pupil constriction reflects attention to light, light detection during eye-movements (reflecting saccadic suppression) and illusory perception of light stimuli. This clearly indicates that cortical visual processing feeds into the pupillary control system, producing slight but consistent constrictions and dilations.

Le but de nos travaux est de progresser dans la compréhension des
processus de récupération des fonctions auditives et langagières après
implantation cochléaire ou prothèse auditive.

Résumé : We used 2-photon calcium imaging and improved analysis methods to record the responses of >10,000 neurons in the visual cortex of awake mice, to thousands of natural images. The recorded population code was high-dimensional, with the variance of its dimensions following a power law. This power law did not reflect the statistics of natural images, as it persisted even when presenting spatially whitened stimuli. A mathematical analysis showed that neural rate vectors lying in a set of fractal dimension d must have variances bounded by a power law of exponent 1+2/d.

The two-headed, dual process view of human thinking has been very influential in the cognitive sciences. The core idea that thinking can be conceived as an interplay between a fast-intuitive and slower-deliberate process has inspired a wide range of psychologists, philosophers, and economists. However, despite the popularity of the dual process framework it faces multiple challenges. One key issue is that the precise interaction between intuitive and deliberate thought processes (or System 1 and 2, as they are often referred to) is not well understood.

There is an ongoing debate on the effects of stimulus history on perception. Recent studies have shown that repeated perceptual decisions to similar stimuli lead to contextual effects, correlated both negatively with the past (negative aftereffects) and positively (serial dependence), sometimes at the same time (Chopin and Mamassian, Current Biology, 2012; Fritsche et al., Current Biology, 2017). However, less attention has been given to understanding how these effects evolve for stimuli further in the past.

I will be presenting some experiments from my PhD thesis, in which I examined how the perception of another’s gaze direction is computed by the human observer, and in turn, how we can compute the direction of gaze that is perceived by the observer. The perception of gaze direction involves the integration of a large variety of visual cues, such as the spatial offset of the pupil, the contrast polarity within the eye region, the orientation of the head, and more indirectly, the emotional expression of the face, and the surrounding context the face is presented within.

The perception of pitch, a dimension of sound that is important for music perception, speech perception, and sound source segregation, is influenced by its context, both sequential and simultaneous. In music, pitch sequences form melodic contours, and simultaneous pitches form chords and harmony. A series of experiments investigated the perception of melodic contour in pitch as well as two other auditory dimensions, brightness and loudness.