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Negative symptoms of schizophrenia are the primary cause of patients’ disability, resulting in major difficulties in everyday functioning and poor quality of life. Strikingly, no pharmacological treatment adequately improves these symptoms. Conversely, several psychotherapeutic interventions exist a

Making decisions under uncertainty, from perceptual judgments to value-based choices, requires combining multiple pieces of ambiguous or conflicting information. Recent research has identified imprecise decision computations as an important contributor to the variability of perceptual and value-base

Aging is associated with myriad behavioral and physiological modifications. Any modification between young and older adults on sensorimotor performances has long been thought to result from deterioration processes only. Are there not any beneficial sensorimotor modifications that accompany and possi

A major goal of sensory neuroscience is to understand how neurons can together extract complex features from natural scenes. Even as early as in the retina, this is still an open challenge. Models built from the responses of sensory neurons to simple stimuli do not generalize to predict how complex,

The appropriate integration of information from multiple senses is crucial for cognitive abilities such as perception, social communication, and decision-making. Multi-sensory integration is altered in autistic individuals, but the underlying neurobiological mechanisms are poorly understood. The pre

There is mounting evidence that variability has an important role in the outcome of sensorimotor learning: in some cases, increased variability during learning is eventually associated with better performance. Regarding developmental vocal learning, an important component of human language, a basal

Under natural conditions, many animals perform fast interceptive movements to catch small moving prey. This behavior requires anticipation of the prey’s displacement and relies on the capacity of the brain to overcome the intrinsic neuronal delays in visual and motor systems. However, we have very l

In humans and animals, the perception of noisy acoustic inputs is thought to depend on the ability to predict upcoming events, constraining and biassing perception to the most probable events. Although the predictive brain hypothesis is supported by a wide range of experimental data, the nature of p

Meditation practices emerged as a promising mental training to improve brain integrity and foster attentional and emotional regulation in ageing populations towards reducing dementia risk. We investigated the effect of meditation training on brain integrity in cognitively unimpaired elderly. The Age

Tool use behaviors have evolved not only in primates but also in some birds (e.g. parrots and crows) and even in some teleost fish (e.g. wrasses and cichlids). As birds and teleosts do not have a six-layered neocortex, these similar cognitive functions must have evolved independently in the lineages

As a key property of the nervous system, timing is essential in decision sequences, and is impaired in many neuropsychiatric conditions. Yet timing is poorly understood and is a difficult capability to control in artificial intelligence. Causally linking brain activity and decision timing could ther

The last 10 years have uncovered a treasure-trove of experimental evidence that cardiac signals influence exteroceptive (somatosensory, visual) sensory processing, through both cardiac cycle effects (CCEs) and heartbeat evoked responses (HERs). The interplay between exteroception and interoception i

BaboFet is an interdisciplinary project that brings together specialists in cortical anatomy, data analysis, fetal MRI acquisitions, non-human primates, and anesthesiology. The project aims at building a unique database of longitudinal fetal brain images acquired on baboons with a very high temporal

Humans are adept at generalizing previous experiences to find novel solutions to problems. This behavioral flexibility is a hallmark of human intelligence while it is often severely impaired in patients with psychological and mental disorders and remains a key challenge for most artificial intellige

High-level cognitive processes such as planning, reasoning or language rely on temporal sequences of mental events. Recent studies of animal behavior have characterized the temporal structure of sequences of elementary behavioral events with similar concepts than those used to describe language, suc

The high prevalence of comorbidities between depression and substance use disorders (SUD) constitutes a growing burden with a major impact on psychological well-being and health systems. This is notably witnessed by the current opioid epidemic affecting the US, where opioid misuse is highly associat

Assemblies of hippocampe place cells form a cerebral cognitive map and are considered to support spatial memory. Although the cerebellum has traditionally been considered a motor structure, our studies revealed its crucial role in the stability of these place cells during active navigation. However,

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of disability in the world. Depression is characterized by persistent low mood, impaired motivation but also by a general decrease in motor outputs that is generally considered as a consequence of brains structures impairmen

Orientation in space is a fundamental cognitive capacity that relies on a brain wide circuit of specialized compass neurons. It develops in young animals, allowing orientation towards the nest, then the spatial navigation system matures progressively to integrate also location and distance informati

Our brains deal and store information through spatial and motor retinotopic maps. The assessment of these maps was for long restricted to the animal model, different studies targeting distinct brain areas and distinct neuronal populations. We aim at determining through whole brain human high field (

Theoretical framework: Our goal is to clarify the fundamental nature of neural processes in the brain that give rise to intelligent perception, cognition and action through a close integration of compatible theoretical, behavioral and neurophysiological approaches. Hypotheses and objectives: A c

Self-beliefs, how we perceive ourselves and our abilities, have a widespread impact on life trajectories. Previous work in psychology and psychiatry has identified self-beliefs as a key predictor in the emergence of mental health disorders, particularly those of anxious and depressive nature: if you

Personality -or individuality- is a striking feature in animal kingdom. Within a similar species, individual animals differ in behavioral traits and preferences, which shape their interactions, their prospects for survival and their susceptibility to diseases. These correlations are well documented,

The macaque monkey has been considered for decades as the best available animal model for understanding the neural mechanisms of visual cognition in humans, in particular for the recognition of faces. Yet, there may be substantial behavioral and neural differences between the two species in face rec

Although unpleasant, pain has a crucial physiological role warning and prompting the organism to protect the injured area and to reduce general activity waiting for healing. However, sometimes, organisms have to face other dangers as confronting a predator or escaping hostile environments and need t

Our society currently faces a pandemic of physical inactivity which is associated with many chronic diseases and deaths. Despite policies aiming to encourage individuals to get involved in a regular physical activity, the prevalence of insufficient physical activity remains elevated. It is therefore

Current views on systems memory consolidation posit that long-term memories are reliant on the neocortex. However, the circuit-level and cellular mechanisms allowing to allocate these memories to specific cortical neural assemblies, the so-called engram cells, are still elusive. Recent data indicate

In CHARM, we will characterize the role of the thalamic reuniens and rhomboid nuclei (ReRh) in systems consolidation of a spatial memory by establishing 1) When, during the consolidation period, ReRh are involved, 2) How ReRh regulate the reorganization of the memory trace between the hippocampus (H

This project aims to study how the cortex and the brainstem reticular formation (RF) act together to control movements in health and under severe and neurodegenerative conditions such as Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS). The RF is typically considered as the main substrate for commanding initia