Sensitivity to the sequential structure and acoustic variations of communication sounds is fundamental not only for language comprehension in humans but also for song recognition in songbirds. Whether and how the auditory system processes fine variations in the temporal and acoustic features remains poorly understood. By quantifying single-unit responses, we investigate whether neurons in a high‑ level auditory area in zebra finches, a songbird species, are sensitive to the ordering of birdsong elements and to their acoustic variations.

La métacognition, c'est-à-dire la capacité de réfléchir à nos propres pensées et processus mentaux, est essentielle pour l'apprentissage et la communication. Un des aspects de la métacognition est la confiance dans nos décisions, ce sentiment étant une bonne prédiction de leurs exactitudes. Cela s’applique également pour les décisions dites « perceptives », comme les décisions visuelles.

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.

Un événement organisé dans le cadre de la Semaine de la santé auditive au travail.

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.

Learning and decision making have hitherto been investigated almost exclusively in multicellular neural organisms. Yet, evidence for learning and decision making have been described in single celled organisms : ciliates and slime molds for instance. In this conference, in the first part of my talk, I will focus on decision making in slime molds and explore various frameworks: nutritional geometry, speed versus accuracy trade-off, Weber's law and social influence.

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.

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.

Who:

Who: