Résumés

RESUMES

Elizabeth M. BRANNON

• Professeur de Psychologie et de Neurosciences - Université de Duke

Titre : Foundations for symbolic mathematics: development and evolution of our primitive number sense

Résumé : I will present a body of behavioral and neural data that demonstrates that there are strong developmental and evolutionary precursors to adult mathematical cognition that can be undercovered by studying human infants and nonhuman primates. I will take the position that the approximate number system serves as a developmental foundation for the uniquely human numerical faculty. Implications for education will be explored by describing a) a longitudinal study exploring the relationship between infants' number sense and later developing mathematical cognition in childhood and b) a set of training studies exploring the link between primitive number sense and symbolic mathematics.

Stefano PALMNTERI

• Post-doctorant au Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives - DEC/ENS

Titre : Contextual control of option value during learning

Résumé : Context-dependency of option values has been studied in respect to adaptive coding and range-adaptation. Here we show with a multiple tasks design, that value contextualization is also deployed at the service of punishment avoidance. This adaptive function is traded against the acquisition of potentially suboptimal preferences. Both effects (adaptive and maladaptive) were well-accounted by a novel learning model, which bridges antagonist 'value-first'-type and 'comparison-first'-type approaches to decision making. The specific computational construct, context value, was represented in a lateral (dorsal and polar) prefrontal system, whereas a medial system (ventral and dorsal) appeared to be limited to decision value encoding. Neural data also sho that contextualization of option value promotes neural efficiency, limiting the need for a punishment opponent learning system. This last observation conciliates wealth of pervious inconsistent findings, advocating smililtude or difference betwen the reward and punishment learning neural systems.

Michael PLATT

• Directeur du Duke Institute for Brain Sciences - Université de Duke
• Directeur du Center for Cognitive Neuroscience - Université de Duke
• Professeur de Neurobiologie - Université de Duke
  

Titre : Decision Making : The Ethological Turn

Résumé : Neuroeconomics applies decision-theory models derived from economics and psychology to inform neurobiological studies of choice behavior. This approach has revealed neural signatures of concepts like value, risk, ambiguity, and temporal discounting, which are known to influence decision-making. Such observations have led to the development of models positing a single, unified decision  process of distinct outcomes like food, money, or social praise. In parallel, recent neuroethological studies of decision-making have focused on natural behaviors like foraging, mate choice, and strategic social interactions. These fundamental decisions strongly impact fitness and thus are likely to have played a key evolutionary role in shaping the neural circuits that mediate decision-making. This neuroethological approach has revealed a suite of computational motifs that may form the ancestral scaffold for decision-making in a wide array of organisms. We argue that the existence of deep homologies in the neural circuits mediating choice behavior has potentially powerful implications for understanding human decision-making in bith health and disease.

Hilke PLASSMANN

• Maître-Assistant à l'INSEAD
• Responsable d'équipe au Laboratoire de Neurosciences Cognitives - DEC/ENS

Titre : How expectancies effect outcome valuation: brain mediators and moderators

Résumé : Drawing on studies of placebo effects on pain perception and several own studies of marketing-based expectations can alter consumption enjoyment or outcome valuation; I establish a model of brain mediators using functional brain imaging and brain moderators using structural brain imaging (i.e VBM analysis).