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

Workshop organized by the ILCB docs&post-docs
2026-03-20 | FRUMAM, 3 place Victor Hugo, Marseille, 13001, France

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
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.
