How does the human brain work ? What algorithms does it use to recognize a face, a number or a word, and understand its meaning ? How does it combine these with other symbols within a sentence or mathematical proposition ? How are these operations materialized in the neural circuits of the human brain ? And will we be able to understand them to the point of developing mathematical models and simulating them in artificial intelligence software ?

Experimental Cognitive Psychology brings together all the disciplines that deal with these questions. Long confined to the analysis of human production and behavior, it now relies on advanced brain imaging and neural decoding technologies to build bridges between neural architecture and mental representations. Year after year, my lectures cover all contemporary methods for analyzing the relationship between thought and brain, and their main findings in the fields of the psychology of language, mathematics, consciousness, metacognition and learning.

My research is mainly carried out at the NeuroSpin center on the Saclay plateau, where the CEA has a vast technical platform for MRI, electro- and magneto-encephalography, in both adults and young children. I use these brain imaging techniques to study the singularity of the human brain. Why are we the only species capable of arithmetic, geometry, language, reading... ?

My hypothesis is that all primates share the same " core knowledge"   which enables them to represent numbers, space, sound sequences... and on which the development of language and mathematical symbols is based ( neuronal recycling theory ). The uniqueness of the human brain lies in its ability to assign discrete symbols to concepts and to compose them to form nested expressions, veritable " mental programs " with recursive organization. This faculty of recursive composition would not be specific to the language network, but would be present in multiple parallel networks for language, mathematics, music, theory of mind and so on.

My experiments are currently testing these ideas, not only in French adults but also, by simplifying the paradigms, in young children, unschooled adults and non-human primates, in order to examine whether it is possible to isolate a format of mental representation specific to the human species.

I am also studying the conscious and non-conscious processing of these mental objects, with the hypothesis that access to consciousness corresponds to the sudden activation, or ignition, of a specific space of mental representation, the global neuronal workspace . This space seems to exist in all primates, but with the evolution of the capacity for symbolic composition, I hypothesize that its content has become much richer in our species.