Laboratory of Cognitive Neuroscience

Sensory and cognitive rehabilitation

The Sensory and Cognitive Rehabilitation team investigates the relationship between cognitive and sensory functions, where we analyze the interactions and synergies of cognitive and sensory processes. This leads to the design of improved types of rehabilitation.

The scientific objectives of our team are:

• To study sensory interactions and balance, and specify how, after sensory loss, the remaining sensory modalities modulate body-space relationships and spatial representations.
• To determine the cognitive interactions and cerebral underpinnings of a wide range of mental functions.
• To clarify the relationship between Balance and Cognition, their interaction and contribution to rehabilitation.
• To evaluate different rehabilitation processes, and to study their mechanisms of actions.

We carry out research on humans (healthy adults, elderly, and in pathologies such as Alzheimer disease, traumatic brain injury (TBI), subjects with post-traumatic stress disorder, and vestibular defective patients). These methods provide us with a powerful approach to gain insightful knowledge from the neural networks involved in sensory perception and cognition, their impairment and restoration.

Multisense and body

The Multisense and Body team aims to elucidate the relative contributions and interactions of the somatosensory, vestibular, and visual sensory systems to own-body awareness, own-body movement perception, and the perception of external stimuli applied on the body. Modulation of these bodily experiences and brain plasticity after impairment of such sensory systems is also investigated (stroke, amputation, vestibular deficits, ageing).

We combine transdisciplinary approaches, including electrophysiology (microneurography, cortical multiunit recordings), brain imaging (fMRI; EEG, optical imaging), and behavioural methods (psychophysics, EMG, multisensory stimulation, postural testing), in both humans and rodents.

Neuronal and dynamic audition

The team « Neuronal dynamics and audition (DNA) » gathers researchers whose expertise spans from integrative and computational neurosciences to cognitive sciences, psycho-acoustics and applied mathematics. We work towards characterizing and understanding the neuronal dynamics underlying several cerebral functions such as resting state, perception, and emotions. This project settled on experimental and theoretical approaches related to the manifold scales of the nervous system’s functioning.

The team projects will be developed on the common hypothesis that the brain has to be considered as a complex system, composed of a large number of elements organized in hierarchical structures interacting at several levels of spatial and temporal scales to produce in fine a distributed and dynamical functional neuronal activity. The main part of the scientific projects of the DNA team will take into account this multiscale organization of neuronal dynamics and will be organized according to the main two scientific interests: understanding and analyzing neuronal dynamics at several scales and understanding and analyzing cognitive functions as auditory perception and its troubles.

Pathophysiology and therapy of vestibular disorder

In France and the USA, vestibular pathologies represent the third most numerous reason for consulting a physician and 5% of hospital emergencies. Our multidisciplinary research team including scientists, faculty teachers, engineers, and clinicians and constitutes a unique and leading structure for the study of the basic mechanisms of vestibular function, thereby meeting a pressing medical need in the field of otoneurology, notably by means of a bench-to-bedside approach.

The team aims to:

• Establish a technology platform unique in Europe combining studies on animal models and patients.
• Decipher the basic mechanisms underlying vestibular disorders and functional restoration.
• Promote outstanding research resulting in high-level scientific production.
• Develop better-targeted and more efficient therapeutic tools against vestibular disorders.
• Become a key player in clinical transfer in order to have a greater impact on the management of balance disorders.
• Promote education on balance function and vestibular disorders.
• Promote the visibility of research in otoneurology and foster the appeal of this scientific area in order to encourage the recruitment of the best researchers and students, and to obtain academic and private sector funding.

Cognition and pathophysiology of the basal ganglia

The general focus of the team’s research is to characterize the nature of the control exercised by the basal ganglia in sensoryimotor and cognitive functions. This set of subcortical structures plays a major role in the control and programming of voluntary movements.

Our team seeks to characterize at the functional and cellular level the impact of pharmacological or surgical treatments on the expression of deficits obtained in different experimental animal models of Parkinson’s disease, in rats and mice. Our approaches are multidisciplinary: behavioural associated with optogenetic, pharmacological and lesional manipulations carried out mainly in rodents. We use a variety of behavioural, instrumental or Pavlovian tests to highlight behavioural changes affecting motor, cognitive and attention aspects following an alteration of dopaminergic systems.

Attention, chronometry and brain dynamics

The members of this new team are mainly concerned with the neural processes underlying timing and executive
control, focusing on a core network of cortical and subcortical structures encompassing the (pre)Supplementary Motor Area, the inferior frontal gyrus (especially in the right hemisphere), and the basal ganglia.

Neural bases of spatial cognition

Our multidisciplinary research aims to understand the neural bases of space navigation. Recent advances make it possible to propose biologically realistic computational models inspired by the concepts of cognitive psychology.

We study not only how animals perceive and orient themselves in space but also the involvement of several neural systems in these abilities.

Emphasis is placed on the role of the hippocampus and several neocortical areas that have distinct functions in spatial treatments. The objective of lesion studies is to describe the differential effects induced by lesions in these structures. Reversible inactivation studies make it possible to analyse the role of structures in specific phases of information processing.
We are also interested in the grid cells of the entorhinal cortex, and seek on the one hand to determine the sensory and neuronal determinants of their activity, and on the other hand how this activity is modified during navigation behaviors.

Neural bases of sensori-motor behavior

Our research is focused on the neural bases of voluntary movements and postural control. With neurophysiological and behavioural studies, we try to understand the relationships between sensory information, internal representations and movement production (e.g., eye and arm movements, locomotion). We devote a special interest to the fusion of sensory information (e.g. visual, vestibular, proprioceptive, cutaneous) and the sensorimotor transformation during movement planning, execution and learning of movement.

Music, language and writing

Our aim is to explore how music and writing contribute to language learning. To address these general questions we will use sophisticated measures of behavior (auditory psychophysics, finegrained kinematics) together with different measures of brain activity and brain structure (ERPs, functional and structural MRI) both in children and in adults, without and with learning disabilities (or movement disorders). A critical factor for an efficient approach of learning is the development of optimal training paradigms, which are at the core of all the proposed projects

Neurodevelopment of motor and social cognition

We aim to understand the brain maturation and development processes allowing harmonious relationships between motor control and social cognition in Humans. In particular, the team focuses on critical periods of brain maturation during adolescence. Initially focused on healthy brain development, the team also looks at neurodevelopmental pathologies such as learning disorders and autism spectrum disorder.
We combine sophisticated measures of motor and oculomotor control, psychophysics and brain imaging.

Neural basis of somatosensory functions

Our goal is to understand the neural basis of somatosensation – the process whereby we experience touch and pain – with an emphasis on identifying molecules that regulate electrogenesis of sensory neurons and detect environmental stimuli within the healthy and pathological somatosensory system. Our research also focuses on characterizing the function of the enteric nervous system in both gastroenterological and neurological disorders.

Brain, obesity and diet imbalance

“Bon appétit!” We all use this idiom, but do we really know how appetite works? Why can it lead to excessive weight gain? What is the brain contribution to the development of obesity? These are some of the questions our team is trying to answer. We focus on characterizing the neural and glial mechanisms that regulate our eating behavior and that can be altered during pathologies such as obesity, anorexia and diabetes. Our research is carried out in a global context where the obesity “epidemic” is a major public health issue worldwide and has been linked to central leptin resistance induced by excessive consumption of fat.
General physiology and functional exploration approaches, such as feeding behavior, calorimetry, telemetry, forced feeding, stereotaxis and electrophysiology, are tools we use in our explorations as well as different mouse models with diet-induced or genetic energy homeostasis disorders. Cellular and molecular biology techniques complete our scientific analytical set.

ATIP Neural bases of motivation

We use the stimuli we constantly perceive in our environment to guide our actions and achieve the goals we have set for ourselves. Understanding how sensory information is sorted and integrated to guide an appropriate motor response is a major challenge in neuroscience. It appears that the network of nodes at the base plays a central role in this process. This network receives a strong innervation of sensory systems and via its downward connections, it is able to regulate motor behaviour.

My team is interested in integrating sensory information into the nucleus accumbens (NAc), the main entry structure of the limbic domain of the basal ganglia. Various external sensory afferences allow the SNAc to be informed of the presence of rewards in the environment. Thus, our work has helped to show that the ventral tegmental area, the basolateral tonsil, and the prefrontal cortex all participate in the excitation of NAc neurons in response to a stimulus predicting a reward. The excitement of these neurons is directly related to the animal’s motivation to engage in foraging. An essential aspect of this circuit, however, is the need for inhibitory control of these behaviours in order to take into account, in particular, interoceptive information, particularly from the digestive system.