The evolution and social functions of human nonverbal vocalisations
2026-06-05 12:00 - 13:00 (Europe/Paris) | 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.

Ecole d'été 2026
2026-08-24 - 2026-08-28
The 9th edition of the Institute of Language, Communication, and the Brain (ILCB) Summer School 2026

Spectacle
2026-09-16 18:00 - 20:00, 2026-09-17 18:00 | Friche la Belle de Mai — GMEM, 41 Rue Jobin, Marseille, 13003

Christian Kell
2026-10-05 12:00 - 13:00
