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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

Participants read words while their neural activity was recorded in an fMRI scanner. The activity in the regions of interest (ROI) highlighted in A, was correlated with word-feature matrices defined by the degree of semantic similarity (SemModel) or orthographic similarity (OrthModel), shown in B. Representational similarity analysis (RSA) revealed atypical hemispheric organization of the reading […]

  “In much of the Event Related Potential (ERP) literature, trial-by-trial signal variability is considered unwanted noise to be discarded through the averaging process. An alternative hypothesis is that this variability carries interpretable information. We quantified variability in sensor space by considering three terms: ‘flyby distance’ to a reference ERP template, distance between trials, and […]

  A subjective distinction can be made between inner hearing—invoking speech representations from memory—and inner speaking—simulating the motor act of speech. A TMS study reveals that lip cortical excitability (“MEP”) increases more with inner speaking than with inner hearing, and that this effect is modulated by the phonetic content of what is produced mentally, hence […]

A few of the distinguished speakers that taught at the 2023 ILCB summer school. From the upper left corner, clockwise: Philipe BLACHE, Patrick LEMAIRE, Chotiga PATTAMADILOK, Christian G. BÉNAR, Sophie ACHARD (Grenoble), Marie MONTANT, Robert (Bob) M. FRENCH (Dijon), Fenna POLETIEK (Leiden, Nijmegen, and IMERA). In the center, the central Nadéra BUREAU. All photos by […]