Deciding between apples and oranges has been an age-old question not just for hungry shoppers but within the field of decision-making research. However, very rarely have researchers considered the possibility to reject either and move on to the next shelf or even leave the shop altogether. I have previously argued that such a sequential decision making framework is not just essential for understanding foraging (1) in the wild, but also ecological, real life, behaviour (2)(3).

Many typological tendencies in languages line up with core cognitive distinctions. For instance, the most common grammatical gender marker in the world’s languages is the distinction male vs. female, with biological gender being a well-known core concept. A possible explanation is that generalizations over core categories are both easier to learn and more likely to be regularized across generations of language learners than generalizations over non-core categories.

The effect of warning on the production of false memories in cognitive aging A large number of studies has pointed out that older adults exhibit enhanced susceptibility to a wide range of memory errors and source misattributions. Encoding and retrieval processes likely make different relative contributions to the increased false memories observed with aging. Due to the persistent and robust nature of false memories, as well as the increase of their incidence with age, there have been many attempts to explore strategies to reduce their occurrence within a laboratory setting.

Over the course of our evolutionary history, technology has affected all facets of human life: our bodies, our brains, our social lives, and our environments. Hunting devices have increased access to high energy food and powered our species’ massive encephalization. Boats have allowed us to cross ecological barriers and colonize new environments. Shared symbolic systems have expanded our capacity to share resources and promoted cooperative interactions between unrelated individuals.

L’Unité de Recherche Clinique Neurosciences UR2CA-URRIS regroupe des praticiens hospitaliers de différentes disciplines convergeant entre autres sur la cognition dans certaines pathologies du système nerveux central (neurologues, neurochirurgiens, radiologues, infectiologues, neuropsychologues). Le Laboratoire UR2CA-URRIS s’intéresse plus spécifiquement aux pathologies inflammatoires telles que la Sclérose en plaques et maladies apparentées.

Current recommendations regarding mathematics education advocate using a large number of examples to foster a deep understanding and promote transfer between problems (cf. Villani-Torossian, 2018). While training on several examples is known to be a decisive step in learning how to flexibly use mathematical concepts in different situations, selecting the optimal sequence of examples remains a significant challenge for mathematics education.

Social touch has been shown to be crucial for development, well-being as well as to be one of the most efficient ways to communicate affective emotions. However, despite its importance, the consequences of lack of social touch has been little studied in human adults, while tactile interactions have decreased drastically these past decades with the increase of people suffering from social isolation. In that context there is a crucial need for a better understanding of the impacts of social touch deprivation. Several projects are envisageable on that topic.

The goal of the internship is to investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying creative idea generation. Creative idea generation can be decomposed into three different components: exploring knowledge, valuating candidate ideas, and selecting a creative idea. The "Exploring knowledge" component will be the one investigated during the internship. The student will have to help in the task design and development, collect and analyze the behavioral data, and interpret the results. This will allow validating the protocol to then use it during a neuroimaging study (fMRI or intraEEG).

When we are awake, part of the information processed by our brain becomes conscious: we can acknowledge it for ourselves, we can report it to others, we can flexibly manipulate it. Despite important advances, there is no consensus on what brain mechanisms underlie this phenomenon. In this team we propose several experimental and theoretical projects that are aiming at a better understanding of these mechanisms.

Our phenomenological experience of the visual world is stable and constant – a remarkable fact, given that the input to the visual brain is ever-changing. Indeed, visual input is constantly interrupted by blinks; the positions of objects on the retina shift with every eye movement; the low-level visual features of objects like color and shading change with differences in lighting.