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After tobacco and alchool, cannabis is the most widely used psychotropic drug, with an estimated 125–227 million consumers worldwide. A link between cannabis intoxication and the development of psychosis has long been recognized and psychotic-like states have been documented in numerous case-reports
Adaptive behavior is composed of planning, initiating and executing actions. A crucial component of adaptive behavior is response inhibition, the capacity to refrain from reacting to external events or internal urges, which underlies the ability to deliberately select one plan of action from amongst
In adulthood, some areas of the brain of mammals, including humans, retain a renewal capacity supported by the maintenance of several populations of neural stem cells which continuously produce new neurons. A thorough knowledge of this striking case of structural plasticity in the mature brain shoul
Attention allows us to explore the environment and to effectively respond to external events. Attention sets priorities on the basis of our goals and of the salience of external stimuli. Human visual attention relies on distinct dorsal and ventral fronto-parietal networks, but little is known about
Ordering information in time is inherent to cognitive and social activities, as well as causality judgements. Such abilities are altered in schizophrenia. However, we do not know whether information is automatically and systematically ordered, and which neuronal mechanisms are involved. We test the
Dystonia is a relatively common motor disorder that is observed in multiple neurological diseases with genetic or neurodegenerative origin. The physiological mechanisms underlying this motor disorder are still rather unclear and this lack of knowledge prevents therapeutic progress for this disease.
Numerous works have defended the hypothesis that the visual system of primates adapts its limited resources to primarily process the most frequent properties in the environment. This so-called «efficient« coding would make it possible to compactly represent the properties of the visual scene at the
Sensory perception and behavior critically depend on neurons and neural circuits to efficiently extract salient information from noisy sensory stimuli in the environment. However, the neural mechanisms that generate perception and behavior remain poorly understood. To address this fundamental questi
Motor skills, such as learning to ride a bicycle or to move our tongue and vocal cords during a conversation, naturally emerge from our experience and are executed without awareness. The acquisition of such fine motor skills (i.e. procedural learning) and sensorimotor learning in general involve bot
Several neuropsychiatric pathologies are characterized by movement disorders, especially repetitive behaviors (RB) such as compulsions, tics, stereotypies or mannerisms. Their distinction by the clinician is not always trivial, in particular when they are defined by their association with other cogn
The primary goal of this project is to understand how adult neurogenesis, ie the process of creating new neurons in the adult brain, influences memory. In other words, can the continuous addition of neurons disrupt or stimulate long-term memory stabilization. A better understanding of the mechanisms
The posterior parietal cortex (PPC) is a major cortical region, involved in some of our most fundamental sensorimotor and cognitive behaviors. Hundred years ago, Korbinian Brodmann was one of the first to relate this functional diversity to the structural heterogeneities of the PPC. Using cytoarchit
Neuropsychiatric disorders are the leading causes of disability and health costs in developed countries. Altogether, the direct costs (spending for treatment, hospitalizations and rehabilitation nationwide) and indirect costs of mental disorders (lost productivity at the workplace, school, and home
Investigations of the noradrenergic system function in the brain have mainly been emerged from animal studies so far. Indeed, the lack of suitable imaging tools has hampered its understanding in human. Nevertheless, we now have the means to overcome this long-lasting difficulty as in vivo imaging of
Epilepsy is a severe neurological disorder characterized by spontaneous recurrent seizure activity. This disease affects up to 1% of the population worldwide, representing solely in the EU a clinical annual cost of 15.5 billion euros. About 30% of the epileptic patients do not respond to available a
Healthy adults generally have a sense of control over their own actions, and over the effects of those actions – a feeling that is classically referred to as “sense of agency”. So far, research on the sense of agency has predominantly been driven by developments in the field of sensorimotor control.
This project aims to investigate the neuronal mechanisms of voice information processing in the primate auditory cortex using a comparative approach. The recent discovery of « voice areas » in the auditory cortex of both humans and macaques offers an exciting research avenue into the cerebral mechan
Unraveling the genotype-phenotype relationship in a heterogeneous disorder, like Parkinson’s disease, is one of the most important challenges towards the dissection of its complex etiology. Further, improving patient characterization for genomic is clearly an important step towards enhancing usefuln
Time is an essential dimension of sensory reality, and plays a central role in cognitive phenomena such as auditory communication and speech perception. Our understanding of how the brain processes temporal information is however in its infancy. This project will examine the neural processing of pur
Our perception of our environment is fundamentally multisensory, based on the combination of extrapersonal (visual and auditory) and self-related sensory information (tactile and vestibular). Psychophysical data show that multisensory information improves perception by reducing ambiguities. This tra
Although most idiopathic epilepsies develop during brain maturation, the physiopathological mechanisms responsible for the building of epileptic networks remain unknown. The identification of such mechanisms is critical for a better understanding of normal and pathological development of cortical ne