Primary Supervisor: Dr Marion Rouault (marion.rouault@gmail.com) Co-supervisors: Dr Valentin Wyart (valentin.wyart@ens.fr) and Dr Valérian Chambon (valerian.chambon@ens.fr) Research Department: Department of Cognitive Studies, Ecole Normale Supérieure, Paris Type of project: Experimental psychology, cognitive neuroscience, computational modeling, big data analysis Topic: We study the neurocognitive mechanisms underlying human metacognition, this ability we have to monitor and evaluate our own cognitive capacities.

Generating predictions is critical to successful speech and music perception. While the literature on auditory prediction is vast, it is usually limited by two features: 1) a conflation of predictability with repetition and 2) the study of a single prediction in isolation. The predictions often studied are therefore quite distinct from those that humans typically deploy: highly complex and continuous. Our proposed projects take advantage of advances in computational modeling to study more realistic forms of prediction.

A computational approach for studying dolphin communication Dolphins use vocal signals to communicate via two different types of sounds: pure tones and pulsed sounds. Pure tones are frequency modulated sounds such as whistles, chirps and screams. Dolphins produce whistles in social contexts. For example, individual dolphins have their own “signature whistle” or “names” that are produced by other members of the group. Pulsed sounds are clicks generated at regular brief intervals, and are used for echolocation.

This project will explore how touch can be integrated with sound and vision in next-generation multisensory human-computer interfaces combining tactile, auditory and visual feedback. It aims to characterize how human integrate multisensory cues into a unified percept. Specifically, we will explore through psychophysical and EEG measurements how reinforcement and disruption of haptic shape or texture representation (e.g. the shape of a button on a display or its texture) occurs when tactile, auditory, and visual cues are independently modulated.

Subject keywords: Neuroscience, Big data, Connectomes, Social cognition, Primate species Project summary : Primates, including humans and monkeys, are intensely social animals (Sliwa et al, Revue Primatologie 2019). To analyze our social environments, our brains make use of three networks of areas we uncovered recently (Sliwa & Freiwald, Science 2017). Yet we don’t know how these networks are connected to each other.

In the Cognitive Psychology Laboratory at Aix-Marseille University, our Team ”Comparative Cognition“ compares abilities such as perception, memory, reasoning, between humans and other primates, notably Guinea baboons. Located on the countryside 1h away from Marseille, the lab is equipped with a worldwide unique, fully automatized behavioral platform to study the baboons’ performances. A group of 25 animals is trained to perform cognitive tasks on touchscreens on a 24/7 basis, generating vast amounts of behavioral data – typically 500.000 trials per experiment.

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD) is a complex neuropsychiatric disorder whose pathophysiology remains largely unknown. We aim at characterizing the interactions between dopaminergic neurons and orbito-frontal cortex during credit assignment from a computational standpoint. To do so, we perform combined intracranial EEG and MEG in OCD patients while they perform decision task. These neural data are analyzed in the light of algorithmic models of decision-making.

According to most theories, the way we talk about the world is limited by basic, probably universal, constraints on how we conceptualize events, space and objects (Slobin, 1973; Bloom, 1973). For instance, models of language production assume that speakers start by event conceptualization (the non-linguistic apprehension of an event), followed by an information selection and linguistic formulation process ending in the production of speech (Levelt, 1989).

- Studying the perception of fast motion is INTERESTING because we move our eyes all the time, and when we move our eyes the images of objects on the retina usually move very fast. The surprising thing is that we almost never perceive this fast motion, even though it's one of the more common stimuli that we experience.

The hippocampus displays specific rhythms and neural activity associated with the different phases of sleep (REM and Non-REM sleep). However, much less is known about the amygdala dynamics during different sleep phases, and how it could be related to memory consolidation or homeostatic plasticity. Here, the intern will work on an existing dataset and develop code using Matlab and Python to provide a thorough description of sleep dynamics in the amygdala.