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.

Cette expérience montre d’une part que le maître agit comme un attracteur pour le chien, comme c’est le cas de la mère pour son bébé. Mais surtout, elle indique un processus commun entre les canidés et les humains, et qui est à l’œuvre entre eux : la synchronisation comportementale du chien sur l’humain, en l’occurrence son maitre, avec l’affiliation existante entre cette paire d’individus.

People with low vision, especially those with Central Field Loss (CFL), need magnification to read. The flexibility of Electronic Vision Enhancement Systems (EVES) offers several ways of magnifying text. Due to the restricted field of view of EVES, the need for magnification is conflicting with the need to navigate through text (panning). We have developed and implemented a real-time gaze-controlled system whose goal is to optimize the possibility of magnifying a portion of text while maintaining global viewing of the other portions of the text (condition 1).