ILCB's monthly newsletter N°37

ILCB's monthly newsletter

N°37 - June 15th, 2024

Institute of Language, Communication and the Brain

Bringing together experts in linguistics, neuroscience, psychology, medicine and computer science to understand and to model how language functions.

Dear members of the ILCB community,

Is there a better way to celebrate the birth of Uyu -- "the one who answers the call" -- than with a publication in Nature Communications? Congratulations to Yannick Becker, Adrien Meguerditchian and the many ILCB members collaborating on our cross-cutting topic “Development and Evolution”.

But that is not the only thing that has happened on the ILCB planet. We hardly finished the excellent workshop on Implicit Learning organised by Arnaud Rey, with un unforgettable dinner on Frioul Islands, that the Conference on Multilingualism brought researchers from all over the world to Aix-en-Provence to learn about cognates, cross-lingual ambiguity and how each language opens a new world, amongst many other topics. Many thanks to Chery Frenck-Mestre, Xavier Alario, Nadera Bureau and all the committee members for organizing this special event. Please note that there is still one more workshop to go in this very month of June!

(Fotos Nuria Gala)

Finally, I invite you to discover everything you still don't know about ILCB on our new institutional brochure -- or ”plaquette” -- recently published by the university services. The file (15MB) is available at https://url.univ-amu.fr/plaquetteilcb.

Best wishes,

Johannes

Portrait of the month

Arielle, the Guinea baboon

Arielle is a Guinea baboon who recently gave birth to a daughter named Uyu, "the one who answers the call" in Wolof. She, her daughter, and the rest of the colony are residents of the primatology centre in Rousset where the CRPN’s Primate Behaviour and Cognition platform is located. Arielle voluntarily takes part in comparative cognition research using a fully automatised computerised system named the Automatic Learning Device for Monkeys, or ALDM.

Like all the members of her group, Arielle can access ALDM at any time from her enclosure. There, she is automatically recognised by the computer using an RFID system. A controlling server assigns her a cognitive task to perform on a touchscreen. At each successful trial, she receives a small food reward; if she makes a mistake, a green screen appears. Every day, Arielle performs about 1500 trials, which takes about 2 hours of her time.

Using this system, Arielle has taken part in numerous published studies on executive control, perception, attention, working memory, abstract reasoning, social cognition or communication and language (see papers here or here). Through her daily routine, Arielle and the rest of her group help us understand how baboons think and what they can or cannot learn, progressively enriching our understanding of cognitive evolution.

(Photo Siham Bouziane)

Figure of the month

Baby Baboon Brain Anatomy Predicts Which Hand They Will Use to Communicate

The planum temporale is a brain area essential for language in humans. In the majority of baboons, this area is larger in the left than in the right hemisphere (shown in red and green, respectively). Baby baboons with this early larger left-than-right PT asymmetry, and only them, will develop a preference for gestural communication with the right hand once they have reached the appropriate age, as shown in red on the left of the graph.

Yannick Becker, Romane Phelipon, Damien Marie, Siham Bouziane, Rebecca Marchetti, Julien Sein, Lionel Velly, et al.
Planum Temporale Asymmetry in Newborn Monkeys Predicts the Future Development of Gestural Communication’s Handedness
2004. Nature Communications 15 (1): 4791 -- @HAL

Quote of the month

Early arguments against interdisciplinarity...:

"The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age."

H. P. Lovecraft (1928)
The Call of Cthulhu