Dr Lei Zhang, in his talk titled "Cracking the neurocomputational mechanisms of flexible (social) behavior in health and disease" illustrated how computational modeling helps to assess flexible learning behavior, in two specific studies, in order to motivate new research avenues in social neuroscience and computational psychiatry.

Björn Lindström, from the Department of Clinical Neuroscience at the Karolinska Institute, gave a talk titled "Human social learning from simple mechanisms" in which he presented and explained two projects analyzing different types of human social learning through the lens of reward learning theory showing that a wide range of social learning phenomena might emerge from the fundamental principles of reward learning.

Victoria Southgate, director at the Centre for Early Childhood Cognition studying the ontogeny and development of human social cognition, showed using behavioural and neuroimaging methods on infants, how they take other perspectives into account and how it influences their cognitive processing.

On May 2nd, Nicolas Goupil defended his thesis titled "Neural and developmental aspects of the perception of socially-relevant spatial relations between people". Congratulations!

In his talk titled “Finding structures and timescales in temporal graphs”, Alain Barrat, CNRS senior researcher at the Centre de Physique Théorique in Marseille, presented recent methods to extract relevant structures and timescales from temporal networks.

On April 13th, Alice Massera defended her thesis titled "Long-term behavioural and neurocognitive outcomes after exposure to early psychosocial deprivation in rhesus macaques: a longitudinal study" supervised by Pier Francesco Ferrari and Holly Rayson. Congratulations!

Alexander Paunov in his talk titled “fMRI evidence for dissociation and interactions between language and theory of mind in adult cognition”, showed that although dissociable, language and theory of mind are also synchronized providing a signature of inter-network information sharing. This supports a view of language and theory of mind as distinct cognitive domains and suggests future work on their division and interactions.

David Thura, from the Impact Team at the Lyon Neuroscience Research Centre, informed us about how control of decisions and actions could share common principles and neural circuits and concluded that there is a strong and adaptive level of integration of decision-making and movement control during goal-oriented behavior in his talk titled: "Behavioral and neurophysiological markers of the integrated control of decision-making and action execution".

Inza KONE, Professor in Conservation Biology at the University Felix Houphoet Boigny in Abidjan, Cote d'Ivoire, and Director General of the Centre Suisse de Recherches Scientifiques en Cote d'Ivoire, informed us on primate conservation challenges, during his talk titled: "Metting new challenges for primate conservation in Cote d'Ivoire: The role of transdisciplinary research".

As part of the Labex Cortex Conferences, Alessandra Angelucci discussed the fundamental role of feedback in early visual processing thanks to new labeling and optogenetic approaches in her talk titled: "Organization and function of inter-areal feedback connections in early visual processing".

On March 20th, Marie Habart defended her thesis titled “Oxytocin and Vasopressin cell networks and influence of early life stress”. Congratulations!

On February 9th, Sébastien Kirchherr defended his thesis titled “Goal representation during a tool use learning task in the primary and premotor cortex of macaque monkey” under the supervision of Pier Francesco Ferrari and James Bonaiuto. Congratulations!

On February 6th, Maëva Gacoin defended her thesis titled “Behavioral and pharmacological enhancement of neural plasticity in the adult visual cortex” co-directed by Suliann Ben Hamed and Michel Desmurget. Congratulations!

On December 16th, Mai Chunmiao defended her thesis titled “The development of non-human primate-like grooming behavior in preverbal infants” under the supervision of Angela Sirigu and Irene Cristofori. Congratulations!

As part of the Labex Cortex Conferences, Ilya Monosov gave a talk about the neurobiology of curiosity. He discussed the biological mechanisms of the intrinsic motivational drives to explore and outlined the circuits through which curiosity can impact value-based economic decision-making in primates and humans.

Before the holidays, everyone was invited to a lunch party during which participants brought a typical dish from their country. A great time was spent altogether!

On December 12th, Felipe Rolando defended his thesis titled “Striatal and hippocampal dynamics during time categorization” under the direction of Sylvia Wirth. Congrats!

On December 2nd, Zixuan Tang defended her thesis titled “Brain representations and behavioral effects of physical distance on action and of social distance on moral judgements”. Congratulations!

On December 2nd, Valentin GUIGON defended his thesis titled “Neurocognitive mechanisms underlying transmission of uncertain information in humans.”. Congratulations!

On December 1st, Jiawei Liu defended her thesis titled “Oxytocin and cross-cultural influence on social decision-making”. Congratulations!

As part of the Labex Cortex Conferences, David Van Essen discussed recent progress in understanding fundamental aspects of cortical structure, development, connectivity, function, and evolution, in his talk titled: "Primate Cerebral Cortex: Principles of Connectivity, Parcellation, and Folding".

On October 25th, Linh lnguyen defended her thesis titled “Reading at the fingertips. What can digital movements inform about visual attention mechanisms in reading acquisition and how they can help”. Congratulations!

Sabrina Ravel, part of the Marmobrain collaborative project, discussed the influence of social position on performance in a stimulus-reward association reversal learning task in common marmoset. The tests carried out through automated testing systems in their homecage highlighted the possibility of studying cognitive abilities without water or food constraints. The results showed that individual cognitive abilities, as well as hierarchy, affect learning speed in marmosets but this wasn’t the case during reversal learning.

Manuel Varlet from the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development, during his talk “Self-other neural and behavioural mechanisms for coordinating with others” presented new research combining frequency tagging and EEG hyperscanning used to investigate self-other neural and behavioural mechanisms enabling interpersonal coordination using auditory and visual information. He highlighted the importance of leadership roles, and the processes specific to each modality underlying interpersonal synchronisation.

Robert Seyfarth, a comparative psychologist renowned for outstanding contributions to understanding animal social cognition, communication and for providing the foundation for many current ideas on the evolution of language and sociality, was invited for a Q&A session. He answered questions about his career, how the field has changed and made progress. He also gave a few insights on where it needs to focus and how the next generation of scientists can contribute to that.

After a long time, the Barbecue Party of the ISC made its comeback on June 30! Starting from 5-6 PM, we shared a great time and a meal together!

Philippe Tobler from the University of Zurich during his talk “Motivational functions of the human midbrain” discussed the nature of the signals of dopamine neurons with the processing of errors in the prediction of both the subjective value and motivational salience of outcomes. Thanks to neuroimaging during a Pavlovian task, analyses revealed that value coding was limited mainly to evidence of reward, in line with the dual dimension hypothesis.

Jerome Sallet from the Stem Cell and Brain Research Institute, during his talk “Circuits for social cognition and foraging of the macaque brain”, presented his work regarding social interactions and circuits involved in making strategic exploratory decisions in macaques. He explained the impact of sociality on brain structure and highlighted the importance of an evolutionary perspective.