If you are in Paris on October 1-3 : we are organizing a fantastic cognitive neuroscience conference at Collège de France, on topics ranging from language to math, education and consciousness, with many of my favorite scientists !
Full program here:
www.unicog.org/seeing-the-m...

Some numbers seem to show up everywhere. Think of 10, 12, 24, 36...
Others—like 26 or 34—don’t get the same attention.Why? In our new paper with @standehaene.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, we argue it's because of how the mind builds number concepts.
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doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

I'm very pleased to share our latest study:
‘Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain’,
by L Evanson, P Bourdillon et al:
- Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub...
- Blog: ai.meta.com/blog/meta-fa...
- Thread below 👇

Deep bidirectional interplay between sensory integration and latent rule discovery https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.29.651167v1

La croisade anti-écrans part en vrille.
Pourquoi la tribune du 29 avril signée par cinq sociétés médicales est tout sauf un argumentaire rigoureux fondé sur des résultats probants.
Ma nouvelle chronique en libre accès dans l'Express:
www.lexpress.fr/sciences-san...

📢 New publication alert! 📢
👂Ever struggled to understand natural speech in a noisy environment? 🤔
Our new research shows that moving rhythmically can actually help you hear better!

royalsocietypublishing.org/eprint/ZWRPM...

with: @strijkers.bsky.social & Noémie teRietmolen

🧵👇

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

I am looking for a PhD student to work on my ERC-funded project to investigate the format of thought in the absence of language in baboons and bees.

Details here: tinyurl.com/5ff9hcjj

Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Docto...

A proposal for unifying statistical learning at different scales: Long-Horizon Associative Learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.12.642610v1

We are hiring! Come work in sunny Marseille!
NeuroSchool PhD contracts in neuroscience are available at Aix Marseille University, France:

I submitted one project (#11) for the call for international PhDs:
"Investigating Music Listening in Human and Non-Human Primates."

Excited to share our new work led by Ana Fló!
We used EEG to show that from birth, human newborns can compute statistical regularities in various dimensions of language, in particular phonemes and voices.
elifesciences.org/articles/101...
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Imagine listening to a language you don't know. When does one word end, and another begin? Human infants face a similar challenge. Scientists have looked at exactly how babies recognise patterns in speech from birth.

New paper from the lab!
Mathias Sablé-Meyer used behavior, fMRI and MEG to study the mental representation of geometric shapes (quadrilaterals ranging in regularity from squares and rectangles to random figures).
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Call for projects - Postdoctoral Study Grants 2025

Merry Xmas to all my co-authors!
Excited to share our work in Science Advances:
"The human auditory cortex concurrently tracks syllabic and phonemic timescales via acoustic spectral flux."
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

New preprint! 🚨

Performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms depends on the scale of the rewards they aim to maximize.
Inspired by human cognitive processes, we leverage a cognitive bias to develop scale-invariant RL algorithms: reward range normalization.
Curious? Have a read!👇

Statistical learning beyond words in human neonates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.26.605295v1

Check out the new study led by Ana Fló :
«These results show that, from birth, multiple input regularities can be processed in parallel and feed different higher-order networks.»

Revised version soon in @elife.bsky.social