Dear members of the ILCB,

It’s my pleasure to see that ILCB is back at cruising altitude with a series of excellent seminars coming up almost every Friday. PhD students and postdocs get a special moment with the invited speaker to discuss their work but please keep in mind that the lunch talks are for all of us.  Many of these events are still held through videoconferencing. For a livelier experience, we suggest organizing watch meetings with your teams or labs. So please join us on these various occasions and feel free to invite speakers.

As mentioned in our last newsletter, we will renew the cross-cutting topics in 2022. A cross-cutting topic group identifies an important scientific question that could be tackled from an interdisciplinary perspective within the next 4 years at ILCB. Don’t hesitate to talk to colleagues around you about this.

Best wishes,

Johannes

"It is, indeed, the default view among us psycholinguists and our students that our science took off during the 1950s. [...]

Its empirical roots go back to the late eighteenth century. It was an established discipline a century later and it was a booming science during the first half of the twentieth century."

photo (c) Max-Planck-Gesellschaft

Willem J. M. Levelt in the preface of A History of Psycholinguistics. The Pre-Chomskyan Era, Oxford University Press, 2013.

The 5th edition of the CuttingEEG conference was held at Le Cube (on AMU's Aix-en-Provence campus) on October 4-7, 2021. It was impulsed by the CuttingEEG organization with the local committee conducted by Anne-Sophie Dubarry and Clement François (LPL). It was supported by several Aix-Marseille institutional sponsors, including the ILCB.

The conference was the first in person event for many of the 202 attendees and speakers since the start of the Covid sanitary crisis. The event featured 14 keynote talks, 12 hands-on tutorials, and 80 posters presentations, all focusing on the latest EEG and MEG developments. The audience was international, with participants and speakers coming from 23 countries, and 51 distant attendees following the hybrid broadcast.

To become a reader, we must learn to relate arbitrary visual symbols (letters) to the sounds of spoken language.  After a few years of training at school, this correspondence between visual words and sounds of language becomes so automatic that the expert reader can literally "hear with his/her eyes."  But can we facilitate this learning? Could other senses be allies?

Felipe Pegado (LPC) will present his research on this topic in the form of a 15 minute stand up at the next Neurostories event held in Marseille on Nov. 25th, where
"quatre chercheurs et une auteure renverseront votre vision des 5 sens et vous en feront découvrir de nouveaux !"

photo (c) drossi @ laprovence

Please check ILCB's events page for the latest update.

Nov. 26th, 12:00 - 16:00

Aurélie Bidet-Caulet, INS (AMU & INSERM)
How does the human brain resist auditory distraction?

Dec. 3rd, 12:00 - 16:00

Andrea E. Martin, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics (Nijmegen)
Boundary conditions for language in biological and artificial neural systems

Jan. 21st, 12:00 - 15:00

Isabelle Darcy, IMERA ILCB fellow, University of Indiana
TBA