Influence of musical background on children’s handwriting

Handwriting is a complex activity involving temporal and rhythmic organization. We tested whether this graphic movement can be influenced by listening to rhythmic cues. Second and Fifth Graders were asked to trace loops while listening to (i) a melodic background without a metronome, (ii) a melodic background with a slow metronome (1.6 Hz), or (iii) […]

Modeling the initial state of early phonetic learning in infants

  The discrimination between [ɹ] and [l] sounds –as in the English minimal pair “rip” and “lip”– can be learned by an unsupervised model such as the self-supervised contrastive predictive coding model (Oord et al. 2018). Performance –ranging from 50% at chance to 100% for perfect discrimination– depends on a number of factors, including: the […]

Different sustained and induced alpha oscillation in the human auditory cortex during sound processing

Alpha oscillations in the auditory cortex are key to attention and the suppression of irrelevant information. Using intra-cerebral recordings, López-Madrona et al. identified two distinct neural sources during rest and auditory stimulation: “oscillatory” sources, defined by strong alpha oscillations at rest, and “evoked” sources, characterised by significant responses to stimuli. Two alpha mechanisms were identified […]

Impact of late to moderate preterm birth on minimal pair word‐learning

Preterm birth can have a dramatic impact on early development. Cognitive and linguistic delays are frequent, but we still know too little about how language develops after moderate-to-late prematurity. François et al. asked babies to associate words or pseudo-words with familiar or unfamiliar objects in various conditions. Association abilities were inferred from the standard Preferred […]

Associations Are All We Need

Do we have and do need more than associations to account for mental activities? A radical associationism proposal should be able to merge the fields of associative, statistical and Hebbian learning. This would unify these theoretical and empirical approaches, schematically represented above. Dates correspond to key publications that have changed the trajectory of theorising in […]

A population of neurons selective for human voice in the monkey brain

Created with BioRender.com Humans and other animals have specialised brain regions dedicated to processing the voice of their conspecifics. We used an fMRI-guided electrophysiological technique on macaque monkeys to investigate one of these regions, the anterior Temporal Voice Area. For the first time, a subpopulation of neurons selectively responsive to human voices was identified. These […]

Predicting Feedback Position and Type During Conversation

During natural interactions, listeners produce reactions in response to speakers, a phenomenon known as conversational feedback. Feedback depends on the main speaker’s production. Our model uses multimodal features to predict when and what type of feedback will occur during conversations. Throughout the conversations, the model computes the feedback probability (the black curve on the top […]

Listeners (Partly) Converge Towards an (Artificial) Partner During Phoneme Categorisation

  Participants were asked to identify a sequence of English speech sounds as “ba” or “pa”, together with an (artificial) partner. After each response, they were informed about their partner’s response, same or opposite. The responses of the artificial agent were covertly manipulated along a number of dimensions. In this animation, each circle represents the […]

Individual effects of sleep deprivation may be observed in vocal biomarkers

  Spectral modulations (“timbre” – left panel) and temporal modulations (“linguistic rhythms” – right panel) characteristics of a sleepy voice. These markers of sleepiness have been derived through the explainability of AI, specifically Support Vector Machines, which were trained to recognize vocal samples from sleep-deprived individuals. This study underscores the importance of elucidating AI through […]