Although the relative expansion of the frontal cortex in primate evolution is generally accepted, the nature of the human uniqueness, if any, and between-species anatomo-functional comparisons of the frontal areas remain controversial. To provide a novel interpretation of the evolution of primate brains, sulcal morphological variability of the medial frontal cortex was assessed in Old World monkeys (macaque/baboon) and Hominoidea (chimpanzee/ human). We show that both Hominoidea possess a paracingulate sulcus, which was previously thought to be unique to the human brain and linked to higher cognitive functions, such as mentalizing.

In an article in PNAS, Emmanuel Chemla (LSCP, CNRS, ENS) together with Isabelle Dautriche (Language team) and Joel Fagot (Comparative Cognition team) show that learning biases for connectedness are present in baboons, suggesting that the shape of the world’s languages (both content and logical words) has roots in general, nonlinguistic, cognitive biases.

Arthur Jacobs obtient le prix Gay-Lussac-Humboldt 2018. Il était l'un des acteurs majeurs dans le domaine de la psychologie cognitive des années 90 à Marseille, ancien membre du centre de recherches en neurosciences cognitives fondé par Jean Requin, il a dirigé la thèse de M. Montant, A. Rey et J. Ziegler. Aujourd'hui professeur à la Freie Universität Berlin, il codirige avec J. Ziegler la thèse de Marion Fechino (LPC, ED 356) sur « poésie et cerveau ». Photo : Avec ses directeurs de thèse, Ariane Lévy-Schoen et Kevin O'Regan, lors de la cérémonie à l'Académie des Sciences le 7 Mai 2019.

In an article in Scientific Reports, Francois-Xavier Alario (Language team) and colleagues showed showed rapid (from ~80 ms onwards) noun-verb differences in the left and (to a lesser extent) right inferior frontal gyri (IFG), but only when those nouns and verbs were preceded by the syntactically predictive context (i.e. their corresponding pronoun).This suggests that syntactic unification manifests very early on during processing in the LIFG. The speed of such syntactic unification operations is hypothesized to be driven by predictive top-down activations stemming from a domain-general network in the prefrontal cortex.

Behavioural synchronization is widespread among living beings, including humans. Pairs of humans synchronize their behaviour in various situations, such as walking together. Affiliation between dyadic partners is known to promote behavioral synchronization. Surprisingly, however, interspecific synchronization has recived little scientific investigation. Dogs are sensitive to human cues, and share strong affiliative bonds with their owners. We thus investigated whether, when allowed to move freely in an enclosed unfamiliar space, dogs synchronize their behaviour with that of their owners’.

The planum temporale (PT) is a critical region of the language functional network in the human brain showing a striking size asymmetry toward the left hemisphere. Historically considered as a structural landmark of the left-brain specialization for language, a similar anatomical bias has been described in great apes but never in monkeys—indicating that this brain landmark might be unique to Hominidae evolution.