Prof. Peter Dániel Simor is one of the residents holding the IMÉRA-ILCB chair this semester. Peter is a psychologist with a particular interest in the neuroscience of sleep, dreaming and mind-wandering. He is and Associate Professor at Eötvös Loránd University (Budapest) and head of the Budapest Laboratory of Sleep and Cognition where he investigated a diverse range of topics related to sleep and dreaming, such as the neurophysiology of paradoxical (REM) sleep, the interplay between of sleep, chronotype and mental health, the role of sleep in learning and memory, or the neurocognitive aspects of nightmares and lucid dreaming. During the fellowship he will study the potential role of mind-wandering in information processing, more specifically, in probabilistic learning. In addition, in collaboration with other researchers they will provide a theoretical framework on the intimate links between covert sleep states and mind-wandering in healthy and pathological conditions.

Paul Best has been awarded an 2024 ILCB post-doc grant to work on the topic of spatialised bioacoustics for the analysis of turn-taking in non-human interactions. Paul’s original background is in computer science and machine learning. During his PhD and post-doc in Toulon university, he worked on automating the analysis of non-human vocalisations using neural networks. Paul has applied these methods to a range of species with a variety of research questions, always working with long-term acoustic data recordings of free-ranging animals. Some of these projects include analysing the presence patterns of sperm whales, characterising the evolution of song structure in fin whales, and linking communicative complexity to sociality in orcas. Currently at CRPN, Paul is working with recordings of pilot whales and cao-vit gibbons, with a focus on how contextualising passive acoustic data with spatial information (the location of the vocalising animal) contributes to a better understanding of their vocal behaviour.