the annual docs&postdocs workshop,
2025-03-27 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Language of sounds and sounds of language

Journées de l’ILCB à Porquerolles
2025-04-23 - 2025-04-25

Exploration interdisciplinaire des rêves et du cerveau.
2025-05-21 - 2025-05-22 | IMéRA
Peter SIMOR, neuropsychologue cognitif et directeur du Laboratoire du sommeil et de la cognition à l’Université Eötvös Loránd de Budapest, sera l’invité de la dernière séance du séminaire Inter-disciplines de l’IMERA les 21 et 22 mai prochains, sur le thème “Exploration interdisciplinaire des rêves et du cerveau.” https://www.imera.fr/agenda/peter-simor-exploration-interdisciplinaire-reves-cerveau/
L’accès est libre et ouvert à tous. Rappelons par ailleurs que les doctorants peuvent faire valoir leur présence à ces sessions au titre de la formation doctorale. Pour cela, ils doivent s’inscrire grâce au lien ci-dessous. Merci de les en avertir, et de leur suggérer de nous contacter, si vous pensez que cela pourrait les intéresser. https://adum.fr/script/formations.pl?mod=3678991&site=CDAMU
La rencontre se fera comme chaque fois en deux temps.

– MERCREDI 21 MAI, 14h-17h
Salle de réunion du premier étage de la Maison Neuve
IMERA Place Le Verrier 13004 MARSEILLE
Séminaire autour des travaux de Peter Simor, animé par Antoni Rodriguez Fornells, Professeur de neurosciences cognitives, Université de Barcelone (résident Iméra), Gabriella Crocco (Iméra), Olivier Morizot et Florence Boulc’h (IRES)
Cette séance vise à préparer collectivement la compréhension du discours qui sera développé le lendemain lors de la grande conférence. Elle se focalisera pour l’occasion sur l’analyse de l’article de Yuval Nir et Giulio Tononi : “Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology“. A travers cette lecture guidée, notre objectif sera de préparer le questionnement de Peter Simor sur la nature des rêves.
– JEUDI 22 MAI, 16h30-18h30
Salle de conférences, Maison des astronomes
IMERA Place Le Verrier 13004 MARSEILLE
Grande conférence de Peter Simor
Between the shores of sleep and wakefulness: from sleep-wake regulation to subjective experiences
Despite its apparently quiet nature and homogeneous nature, sleep is a markedly heterogeneous state with respect to biological functions, neurophysiological properties, information processing and mental experiences. The sleeping brain is constantly monitoring the balance between the internal homeostatic demands and the need to monitor the external environment in order to detect potential threats or relevant information. Far from passive, the sleeping brain continually negotiates between internal homeostatic needs and the imperative to remain attuned to the external world, in case of threats or salient stimuli. In doing so, it oscillates along a dynamic continuum between deeper, disconnected states and lighter phases marked by heightened information processing. Oneiric (dream) experiences seem to take part in this process and reflect the underlying cyclic patterns of sleep and wake regulation. Are dreams simply epiphenomena or inherent aspects of the sleeping brain? Do they reflect random neural activations or convey personally meaningful information? In this talk, I will explore these questions through the lens of contemporary dream science and cognitive neuroscience, integrating insights from interdisciplinary fields such as neuropsychoanalysis and consciousness research.

Bibliographie préparatoire
Yuval Nir and Giulio Tononi. Dreaming and the brain: from phenomenology to neurophysiology Trends in Cognitive Science 14(2), 2009. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2009.12.001

The foundations of verbal working memory in the language system
2025-05-23 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Paris) | Espace Pouillon, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003
Steve Majerus
Professeur à l’Université de Liège
https://www.uliege.be/cms/c_9054334/fr/repertoire?uid=u182078

Many models of verbal working memory acknowledge interactions with verbal long-term memory. The nature of these interactions remains, however, a matter of debate. I will present a series of behavioral and neuroimaging studies showing that (1) even subtle aspects of language knowledge such as syntactic positional knowledge can influence verbal working memory, (2) the capacity and neural substrates of verbal working memory cannot be defined independently of the linguistic nature of the stimuli to-be-maintained, (3) recruitment of deep semantic knowledge may not characterize all WM situations. Our results support hybrid linguistic models of verbal WM considering that verbal WM is grounded in the language system but cannot be reduced to it.

Workshop : Curiosity and intrinsic motivation in infant-child learning
2025-06-27 10:00 - 2025-07-01 17:00 | IMéRA
27 June 2025 / 1 July 2025 from 10am to 1pm – Maison Neuve, Iméra

PROGRAMME

Embodied and Situated Language Processes Conference
2025-09-23 - 2025-09-26 | Théâtre Antoine Vitez, 29 Av. Robert Schuman, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
ESLP 2025 will be hosted by Aix Marseille Université, organized by the members of the CRPN (UMR CNRS 7077, Aix Marseille Université) in collaboration with SCALab (UMR CRNS 9193, Université de Lille).
The Embodied and Situated Language Processing (ESLP) Conference, provides an interdisciplinary forum discussing current developments in grounding during online language processing. It welcomes a broad spectrum of methods to examine the interaction of language and sensory and motor processing, such as behavioural, neurophysiological and computational approaches, to foster research in the context of theories of semantic grounding or embodiment and pragmatic situated communication and language use.
This year’s conference will expand its scope to include perspectives on non-human cognition. The historic city of Aix-en-Provence, with its rich academic heritage and strong tradition in cognitive science research, provides the perfect backdrop for fostering interdisciplinary exchanges between researchers.

Programme
Conference registration

Workhop " Social Cognitive Neuroscience Across Species"
2025-09-25 - 2025-09-26
socialworkshopslide
👉 Program Workshop Social Cognitive Neuroscience Across Species

Cultural evolution creates language-like structure: from humans to humpback whales and beyond
2025-09-26 14:00 - 15:30 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Simon Kirby
University of Edinburgh

All known languages are made up of statistically coherent sequences – words – whose frequency distribution follows a power law known as a Zipfian distribution. Despite the ubiquity of these features across languages their origins are poorly understood. In this talk, I will argue that they arise because they facilitate learning and therefore emerge through the process of cultural transmission of language. I will summarise results from an experiment in which non-linguistic sequences evolve as they are transmitted from generation to generation of participants. By using insights from infant speech segmentation, I analyse those sequences and observe the emergence of Zipf’s law over generations. This work makes a prediction that we should find Zipfian distribution of statistically coherent sequences wherever systems culturally evolve, including in other species. However, so far these features have only been found in humans. In the second part of the talk I will turn to the culturally evolving song of humpback whales and apply the same analytic technique to 8 years of whale recordings. We show for the first time in another species that these characteristic statistical properties are indeed present in whale song. By doing so, we demonstrate a deep commonality between two species separated by tens of millions of years of evolution but united by both having culture. Finally, in the last part of the talk I will present ongoing work on the development of the same features in a third unrelated species.

Multidimensional Semantics for Concrete and Abstract Concepts
2025-09-29 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Penny M. Pexman
Western University, Canada

Multiple representation theories posit that concepts are represented via a combination of properties derived from sensorimotor, affective, linguistic, and other experiences. One advantage of this approach is that it helps address the challenge of abstract meanings, like wisdom and friendship, which are central to our mental and social lives and yet cannot be directly experienced through the senses. I will describe a series of studies in which my colleagues and I have tested predictions of multiple representation theories for acquisition and processing of concrete and abstract word meanings, exploring the roles of sensorimotor, interoceptive, and social experience. The development of large-scale word norms and behavioural megastudies has enabled consideration of multiple lexical and semantic dimensions and exploration of the possibility that these dimensions have simultaneous and interacting effects on behaviour. Using these “big data” I will consider how these multiple factors might be mapped in semantic space.

BIO: Penny Pexman is Vice-President (Research) and Professor of Psychology at Western University She joined Western in 2023, having previously spent 25 years at the University of Calgary, where she served in a number of research leadership roles including Associate Dean (Research) in the Faculty of Arts and Associate Vice-President (Research). Penny was Editor-in-Chief of the Canadian Journal of Experimental Psychology and Associate Editor of the Journal of Memory and Language. She is past President of the Canadian Society for Brain, Behaviour and Cognitive Science, past Governing Board Chair for the Psychonomic Society, a current member of Governing Board of the Cognitive Science Society, and co-founder of Women in Cognitive Science – Canada.
Penny’s research expertise is in cognitive development, psycholinguistics, and cognitive neuroscience. In broad terms, she is interested in how we derive meaning from language, and how those processes are changed by experience. She has published more than 150 journal articles on those topics. For over 2 decades her work has been continuously funded by two of Canada’s federal funding organizations (SSHRC and NSERC), including NSERC’s prestigious Discovery Accelerator Supplement. She is an elected fellow of the Canadian Psychological Association and the Association for Psychological Science and has been honoured with 9 awards for mentorship and teaching excellence.

The Role of Social Experience in the Grounding of Abstract Concepts
2025-09-30 09:30 - 12:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Thesis defense of
Daria Goriachun
Under the direction of de Johannes Ziegler (CRPN) et Núria Gala (LPL)
Jury :
Johannes Ziegler – Directeur de thèse
Núria Gala – Co-directrice de thèse
Anna Borghi – Rapporteure
Penny Pexman – Rapporteure
Gabriella Vigliocco – Présidente du jury
Kristof Strijkers – Examinateur
Abstract :
Understanding abstract concepts like justice or freedom, which do not refer to physical objects, poses a challenge for theories of language processing. This thesis investigates how social experience—both the degree to which words are socially relevant (their socialness) and the social context of communication—affects their processing. Across several experiments, participants processed abstract and concrete words, alone or in pairs. Results show that the social dimension of words affects processing, particularly when participants cooperate. Social interaction thus modulates the way abstract concepts are understood, suggesting that our social experiences can provide grounding for concepts not directly linked to perception or action.

What self-supervised speech models know about animal sounds: Deep transfer learning and the evolution of acoustic communication across species
2025-10-02 14:00 - 18:00 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Thesis defense of Jules Cauzinille
Thesis supervisors : Benoit Favre (directeur de thèse), Arnaud Rey, Ricard Marxer

Jury :
Benjamin Lecouteux (président du jury)
Nicolas Farrugia (rapporteur)
Marie Tahon (rapporteur)
Emmanuel Chemla (examinateur)

Abstract:
This thesis introduces a novel approach to the study of vocal communication and its evolution across species through the use of deep transfer learning. We ask whether, and how, self-supervised models trained on speech data may provide suitable representations of bioacoustic information. Our initial focus is on non-human primates and is motivated by the apparent gap between state-of-the-art speech processing methods and the way the vocalizations of our closest living relatives are handled in recent computer science literature. We present experiments centred around transferring knowledge from speech to gibbon songs and propose a set of hypotheses on the evolution of acoustic communication and its phylogenetic ties. A second set of experiments aims at challenging initial hypotheses by extending the experimental framework across a broader range of species and tasks where we explore speech models’ latent representations through innovative probing strategies. We conclude on theoretical perspectives related to the convergent evolution of vocal communication across species, while advocating for the integration of speech in future research aimed at developing general bioacoustic foundation models.

Fête de la science
2025-10-03 - 2025-10-13 | Parc de Bagatelle, 125 Rue du commandant rolland, Marseille, 13008, France
Programme

ILCB’s Annual welcome back party
2025-10-10 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
9:30 Acceuil café
10:00 Introduction
10:10 Olga Kepinska : Multilingualism and Linguistic Diversity as a window into prenatal language acquisition
11:10 Philippe Albouy : Brain oscillations and cross-frequency coupling as markers of auditory working memory functions
12:00 Lunch

Towards a Comparative Approach to Interactional Systems: Cross-disciplinary Contributions from Ethology and Linguistics
2025-11-28 14:30 - 17:00 | Espace Pouillon, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003
Thesis defense of Lise Habib-Dassetto
Supervisors:
Marie MONTANT, Maîtresse de Conférences – Aix-Marseille Université
Cristel PORTES, Professeure – Aix-Marseille Université
Alban LEMASSON, Professeur – Université de Rennes 1

Les membres du Jury:
Thibaud GRUBER, Rapporteur, Associate Professor – Université de Genève
Elise HUCHARD, Rapporteur(se), Directrice de Recherche – CNRS
Maël LEROUX, Examinateur, Maître de Conférences – Université de Rennes 1
Roxane Bertrand, Présidente du jury, Directrice de Recherche – CNRS

Abstract:
Animal communication research often focuses on the search for meaning and structural rules within signals produced by an emitter, drawing comparisons to human language. Most studies examine only a single communicative modality (vocal, visual, or tactile). This thesis takes a complementary approach by considering communication, in both humans and non-humans, as an interactive social act. It draws on Levinson’s Interaction Engine theory, which posits that humans possess universal predispositions for coordinated interaction, providing evolutionary foundations for language. Human interactions are organized, cooperative, and governed by conventions, such as turn-taking and repair mechanisms. They are also mediated through multimodal communication. To investigate these mechanisms in animals, we adopt principles of ethology, treating communication as a biological trait shaped by evolutionary processes. The thesis is structured along three axes: theoretical, methodological, and empirical. Theoretically, we propose comparing the interactional systems of different species to highlight general properties as well as species-specific patterns. We also advocate integrating all communicative modalities and examining how species’ social and ecological environments shape interactions. Methodologically, we introduce Multi-Interaction, a new framework and open-access tool applicable across species, designed to process multi-agent and multimodal communicative sequences. This method makes it possible to study communicative signals as well as actions produced during exchanges. For the first time, it systematically incorporates intra- and inter-individual overlaps, i.e., the simultaneous production of gestures, vocalizations, facial expressions, and actions, rather than treating these elements sequentially. This approach aims to minimize information loss. It also provides new quantitative measures to describe these sequences. Empirically, we implement these theoretical and methodological approaches in two studies of a captive group of Guinea baboons and in a comparative study across four primate species. Our results show that Guinea baboon interactions are flexible and adapt to social contexts. Individuals contribute in varying proportions depending on their sex and the centrality of their partner. Two interactants also produce inter-individual overlaps in varying proportions according to their sex and the frequency of their exchanges. These results suggest that interactions serve to maintain and negotiate social, hierarchical, and reproductive relationships. We show that, compared to actions, ritualized communicative signals streamline temporal coordination between interactants. Moreover, the size of the interactional repertoire decreases with social experience, indicating that repetition fosters efficiency and conventionalization. Finally, our comparative study of Guinea baboons, chimpanzees, red-capped mangabeys and human infants, highlights different uses of multimodal and multi-component communication, consistent with the social and ecological environments of each species. These results support the Social Complexity Hypothesis (which links the complexity of communication to the constraints of group living) as well as ecological efficacy-based hypotheses (which explains the use of multimodality as an adaptation to ecological constraints). This thesis argues that interactional behaviors across species should be seen as flexible and adaptive biological traits, shaped by conventions as well as by social and ecological pressures.

Keywords: animal communication, social interaction, multimodal communication, evolution, sociality, ecology, primates

Neuroimaging Meeting (RMN)
2025-12-11 10:00 - 12:00 | Amphithéâtre de CERIMED, 27 Boulevard Jean Moulin, Marseille, 13005
We’re looking forward to two presentations on ongoing local projects.

– Mattia Cazzolla (INT) : “Processing and Analysis of Fetal Diffusion MRI” (with O. Coulon, G. Auzias, F. Rousseau, J. Sein, N. Girard, B. Leroux).
– Camilla Di Pasquasio (INT) : “Using fMRI to assess the social competence of an autonomous conversational robot” (results from Convers1 and project Convers2, with T. Chaminade, M. Cavazza, B. Bigi, B. Nazarian).

NLP & Cognition: Exploring the Interfaces
2025-12-12 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
The NLP & Cognition working group (GT) of the GDR TAL – CNRS is pleased to announce its upcoming meeting:
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1PKVes0OPHQ5kJUkYroZV85sAKtKe2eSfnM1JbwBgGxw/edit?tab=t.0#heading=h.h07fvminzexw

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Social Cognition and Stress
2026-01-19 | Le CAMPUS SAINT CHARLES, place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13003
Campus Saint Charles, Amphithéatre Charve
Date : Monday January 19th 2026 9h-17H
PROGRAM
9h-9h50 Emilie Caspar , Université de Ghent
Applying Neuroscience to Post-Genocide Contexts: Participation in Violence, Intergroup Biases, and Trauma
09h50 Themis Apostolidis – Aix Marseille Université
Health, Illness and Society: The Social Representations Perspective
10h40 Pause café
11h10 Corinne Dano, CHU d’Anger
Social Cognition Deficit in Alcohol Use Disorder in Clinical Practice
12h Déjeuner (salle des voutes)
13h30-14h20 Louise Kirsch, Université Paris Cité
The Interplay Between Social Touch and Stress
14h20-15h10 Magalie Ochs, Aix Marseille Université
From User to Embodied AI: Automatic Analysis and Generation of Multimodal Socio-Affective Behaviors for Human-Machine Interaction
15h10 Pause café
15h40 Sylvie Thirion, Aix Marseille Université
Stress, Allostatic Load and Social Cognition: Neurobiological Bases of Vulnerability and Resilience
16h30 Final remarks
*NB some presentations will be in French

WHERE
Hybrid – attend in person at Campus Saint-Charles (Charves Amphitheater) or join online
REGISTRATION
Free but mandatory here.. https://drivenbyothers.sciencesconf.org/

BRAINNHACK
2026-01-28 - 2026-01-30
Programm

Restitution des projets Ingénierie Cognitive MASCO 2026
2026-01-30 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
UE IngéCo -20Jan_2026

Adaptation to a bilingual input and variability in early language acquisition
2026-02-06 10:30 - 12:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Prof. Laura Bosch from Barcelona University

Abstract:
Infants and children growing up in bilingual/multilingual environments should no longer be considered as exceptions to the norm, even for those living in monolingual societies. But bilingualism is a broad construct, covering a diversity of dual language exposure contexts, modulated by differential properties of socio-educational environments and language typologies. Adequately addressing the heterogeneous nature of bilingual language acquisition remains challenging. Research developed in the last twenty-five years, reflects important changes in the type of questions that have been addressed: from an initial focus on early language differentiation issues, to more recent studies focusing on the identification of adaptive mechanisms, understanding variability in acquisition, and getting more nuanced views on the processes that lead to building separate but interconnected language systems from a dual language input. In this talk, I will first summarize studies based on infants simultaneously exposed to close language pairs (e.g., Spanish and Catalan), and I will then contrast these studies with data obtained from populations exposed to more distant languages. Language proximity stands out as a factor likely to modulate acquisition in such domains as phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic acquisition. The talk will successively cover two separate but interconnected areas: the early building of native language phonetic/phonological categories, and word-learning strategies in dual vocabulary building. This narrow focus might contribute to identify research questions that remain open for future studies on early bilingualism.

Workshop organized by the ILCB docs&post-docs
2026-03-20 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
The annual workshop organized by ILCB docs&postdocs will take place on March 20 in Marseille, St Charles, and is open to all researchers and students within the ILCB community. The main objective of the workshop is to foster interactions and exchanges among students and researchers from the different ILCB labs, and we therefore strongly encourage all ILCB members to attend.
The program will include short talks by PhD students, postdocs, and researchers, a keynote lecture by our ILCB Iméra fellow Philippe Albouy, and a poster session. New this year: all registered participants may present a poster (upon notification, for organizational purposes).
Reminder: all PhD students and postdocs within the ILCB perimeter are warmly invited to join the Docs&Postdocs group. For further information, please contact elin.runnqvist@univ-amu.fr and nadera.bureau@univ-amu.fr.

Cerveau, intelligence artificielle et science ouverte
2026-04-02 17:30 - 19:30 | IMéRA
Philippe Albouy, titulaire de la chaire ILCB/Iméra – Langage, communication et cerveau

Link : https://www.imera.fr/agenda/cerveau-ia-science-ouverte/

Seminars
2026-04-10 10:00 - 12:00 | Amphi 7 Université, 29 avenue Robert Schuman, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Usha Goswami :Centre for Neuroscience in Education, University of Cambridge
Dyslexia, Rhythm, Language and the Developing Brain
Recent insights from auditory neuroscience provide a new perspective on how the brain encodes speech. Using these recent insights, I will provide an overview of key factors underpinning individual differences in children’s development of language and phonology, providing a context for exploring atypical reading development (dyslexia). Children with dyslexia are relatively insensitive to acoustic cues related to speech rhythm patterns. This lack of rhythmic sensitivity is related to the atypical neural encoding of rhythm patterns in speech by the brain. I will describe our recent data from infants as well as children, demonstrating developmental continuity in the key neural variables.

Martin Pickering : University of Edinburgh
An augmented psychology of language

Testing the neural noise hypothesis of dyslexia
2026-04-20 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Dyslexia is a specific learning disorder affecting approximately 7–12% of the population and is more commonly diagnosed in males than in females. While several cognitive and neural factors associated with dyslexia have been identified, the precise causal mechanisms underlying reading difficulties remain unclear. One recent account, the neural noise hypothesis (Hancock et al., 2017), proposes that reading difficulties arise from an imbalance between excitatory and inhibitory (E/I) processes (increased cortical excitability) leading to impairments in phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming, and multisensory integration.
I will present our studies which tested key predictions of this hypothesis. First, we examined whether low-level multisensory integration contributes to dyslexia and whether this effect is sex-specific. Next, we directly tested the neural noise hypothesis using electroencephalography (EEG) power spectrum measures and concentrations of Glutamate (Glu) and GABA obtained with magnetic resonance spectroscopy (MRS) at 7T.
Only males with dyslexia exhibited deficits in multisensory integration of simple, non-linguistic stimuli, as assessed by a reaction time task. However, EEG and MRS results, supported by Bayesian analyses, provided no evidence for differences in E/I balance between groups, challenging the hypothesis that cortical hyperexcitability underlies dyslexia.

Bio
Katarzyna Jednoróg is a professor of cognitive neuroscience and head of the Laboratory of Language Neurobiology at the Nencki Institute of Experimental Biology, Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw. Her research focuses on the neurobiological basis of language and reading development in both typical and atypical populations, with a particular emphasis on developmental dyslexia. She investigates how brain structure and function support literacy acquisition, using non-invasive neuroimaging methods such as EEG, fMRI, and magnetic resonance spectroscopy.

8th Annual Meeting of the Society for the Cognitive Science of Culture
2026-04-22 - 2026-04-24 | Théâtre Antoine Vitez, 29 Av. Robert Schuman, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
8thAnnual Meeting of the Society for the Cognitive Science of Culture. The Society aims to promote research into the role of culture on cognition, with a particular focus on extending research beyond WEIRD populations.
The meeting will take place from 22nd to 24th April 2026 at Aix-Marseille University in Aix-en-Provence, France.
This year, we are honoured to welcome four outstanding keynote speakers.
Prof. Usha Goswami, University of Cambridge
Brain Beats: Cognitive Science and Cognitive Neuroscience of Rhythmic Language
Prof. Helmut Leder, University of Vienna
Beauty as sensory pleasure?
Prof. Patrick Lemaire, Aix-Marseille University
Mathematics across cultures: What can we learn about the role of culture on cognition?
Dr. Daniele Schön, Aix-Marseille University
Music as window into language processing and rehabilitation
We invite abstract submissions for 20-minute talks and posters from the full spectrum of research interested in the relationship between cognition and culture in its many forms across domains including psychology, neuroscience, behaviour, linguistics and literature, visual art and music.
Please visit the submission website for further information: https://culturalcogsci.org/AnnualMeeting.html
Submission Deadline: January 31st 2026
Early bird registration: Until February 28th 2026
The SCSC 2026 Organizing Committee

dedicated to “Quantitative imaging and its applications.”
2026-05-04 | Amphithéâtre de CERIMED, 27 Boulevard Jean Moulin, Marseille, 13005

Integrating Neural Noise and Neuroinflammatory Hypotheses: Exploring the Comorbidity of Dyslexia, Depression, and Stress
2026-05-22 12:00 - 13:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Fumiko Hoeft
Recent advancements in our understanding of dyslexia have highlighted the complex interplay between neurobiological mechanisms and comorbid conditions such as depression and stress. The Neural Noise Hypothesis (NNH) of dyslexia proposes that dysregulated neural activity, characterized by excessive glutamatergic neurotransmission, leads to the disrupted auditory and visual processing that typifies this learning disorder. Concurrently, emerging research suggests that these neural irregularities may overlap with pathways involved in stress and depression, pointing to a shared neurobiological foundation. This presentation explores the synthesis of the NNH with recent findings on the role of neuroinflammation in dyslexia and its comorbidities. Building on our foundational work (Hancock, Pugh, and Hoeft, TiCS. 2017), and integrating recent insights into stress and mood disorders from neuroimaging studies, we propose a model where dyslexia-related neural noise may exacerbate susceptibility to depression through neuroinflammatory pathways. This model is supported by recent research by Lasnick and Hoeft (Front Hum Neurosci. 2023), which provides compelling evidence of altered neural connectivity in regions critical for emotional and stress regulation in individuals with dyslexia. Furthermore, this talk will delve into how environmental stressors and individual resilience factors contribute to the variability in dyslexia presentations, particularly focusing on how these elements interact with neurobiological mechanisms to influence the severity and range of comorbid symptoms. By bridging gaps between disparate research domains, we aim to foster a more comprehensive understanding of dyslexia that acknowledges its potential as a multisystem disorder with significant neurobiological and psychosocial dimensions. This integrated approach sets the stage for discussing potential interventions that target these overlapping pathways, offering hope for more effective treatments that address both the core symptoms of dyslexia and its common comorbidities.

The evolution and social functions of human nonverbal vocalisations
2026-06-05 12:00 - 13:00 | B011 LPL, 5 avenue Pasteur, Aix-en-Provence, 13100, France
Dr. Katarzyna PISANSKI
Human nonverbal vocalisations such as screams, cries, and laughter convey socially vital information, yet have received far less attention than speech. We still know very little about how emotional vocalisations develop, how we use them in everyday life, or how they vary across cultures. While human vocalisations share important features with the calls of other mammals including primates, humans are unique in one crucial respect: we can flexibly and deliberately modulate our voices for social ends, for instance by exaggerating or completely faking pain or pleasure. In this talk, I argue that our advanced capacity for volitional vocal control represents a critical bridge between animal calls and human speech. I will present evidence that (1) the acoustic forms of human vocalisations have evolved to support their communicative functions; (2) voluntary vocalisations systematically exploit these same form–function mappings for social benefit; (3) data from children and deaf adults show that such vocal control depends on learning; and (4) cross-cultural findings reveal both universal patterns and culturally specific variation in emotional vocalisations. Together, this body of work shows that human vocalisations — and our capacity to produce them voluntarily — are powerful social tools shaped by both selection pressures and social experience, offering unique insights into the evolution of vocal control.

Brain mechanisms for structuring and searching through knowledge via cognitive maps
2026-06-29 11:00 - 12:00 | Salle des voûtes, St Charles, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France
Simone Viganò (Neurospin, CEA & Université Paris-Saclay)
A central challenge for the brain is not only storing knowledge, but organizing it in a form that can be flexibly searched, recombined, and used to guide behavior. Over the past decade, the cognitive map framework has emerged as one leading account of how this may be achieved, proposing that neural systems involved in spatial navigation also support the representation of abstract relationships among concepts, memories, and experiences.
In this talk, I will discuss a series of fMRI, sEEG, and eye-tracking studies conducted in recent years to investigate how cognitive maps support the organization, retrieval, and exploration of knowledge across different domains. These studies suggest ways in which the cognitive map framework may be extended to accommodate some of the distinctive characteristics of primate interactions with the environment and human conceptual knowledge.

Spectacle
2026-09-16 18:00 - 20:00 | Friche la Belle de Mai — GMEM, 41 Rue Jobin, Marseille, 13003
