"Musicians at the cocktail party: Neural correlates of bottom-up and top down mechanisms" Robert Zatorre Montreal Neurological Institute McGill University Segregating sound mixtures makes demands on multiple cognitive and neural mechanisms that musical training may enhance or exploit. In a series of studies we have documented the music-related enhancement behaviorally in the context of speech […]

"Using Data Science to Study Children's Cognitive Development" Abdellah Fourtassi Following the seminal work of Piaget, the traditional approach in cognitive development has focused on studying the structure of children’s knowledge in controlled situations (e.g., laboratory experiments). While this approach allows for precise inference about how children behave in certain tasks, it cannot provide an […]

What we learn and when we learn it: the interaction of maturation and experience in music and language Virginia Penhune Department of Psychology, Concordia University Laboratory for Motor Control and Neural Plasticity https://www.concordia.ca/artsci/psychology/research/penhune-lab.html The impact of training or experience is not the same at all points in development. Children who learn to play a musical […]

Pascal Belin, Institut de Neurosciences de La Timone, CNRS & Aix-Marseille Université, France --------------------------- How do we extract and process the treasure-trove of information in voices? Experiments involving techniques ranging from monkey neuroimaging to deep learning provide an increasingly detailed picture of the ‘vocal brain’ and its evolution in primates. Results suggest an organization in […]

Brain-language models, prediction and the neural basis of communication

The Dawn of Speech is Older Than We Thought The production of speech repurposes an entire set of anatomical features that are primarily used for vital functions: breathing, sucking, chewing and swallowing.  Hypotheses about the dawn of speech try to determine the period during which our ancestors began to produce, by exaptation, differentiated vocalizations associated […]