Ilaria Sani from the University of Geneva, showed that like fronto-parietal attentional areas, the posterior inferotemporal area exhibits significant attentional modulatory activity by combining a demanding behavioral paradigm with functional neuroimaging and diffusion tractography across primate species.

Some of our lab members took part in the 33rd symposium of the Société Francophone de Primatologie in Saint-Etienne, from October 20. Over 3 days, speakers held talks on subjects ranging from primate cognition to conservation. Notably, our lab head, Pier Francesco Ferrari, gave a talk on the evolution and development of the social mind in primates, and Catherine Crockford on the patterning and ontogeny of chimpanzee vocal sequences and involved brain pathways. All also attended Frans de Waal’s conference, who was named Docteur Honoris Causa of Saint-Etienne Jean Monnet University on that occasion.

Catherine Crockford is a Director of Research at the ISC CNRS in Lyon and head of the the Great Ape Social Mind Lab. During a conference organised by the Labex Cortex, she presented her work on the ontogeny of chimpanzee vocal sequences and brain pathways.

Luca Bonini spoke at the ISC in his talk “Beyond mirror neurons: the social affordance hypothesis”, in which he used recent data to challenge classic views on the functional properties of these neurons and propose a new, more complex perspective.

October 11th, Mathilda Froesel defended her thesis “Cortical and subcortical neural bases of audio-visual social processing in macaques” under the direction of Suliann Ben Hamed. Congrats !

Felipe spent the past year as a research engineer in team NeuroPrime (Jean-René Duhamel/Sylvia Wirth). He has proven to be an invaluable asset to the institute, not only scientifically, but also taking initiatives such as Game Nights, or the new recycling program. We thank him for his wonderful presentation on corvids' cognition, held during the Students Journal Club, and wish him well on his future endeavors.

Sylvia Wirth, Liuba Papeo, and Bassem Hiba gave been nominated Director(s) of Research. This is a great achievement for all of them. Their scientific work in the past years has been highly valued and now there is an official confirmation from the CNRS.

Roman Wittig is a biologist and has worked in these years on the evolution of social cognition and cooperation. In the last years he focused on the neurohormonal & cognitive regulation of chimpanzee cooperation and competition, as well as on chimpanzee warfare and hunting behaviour. He is also co-PI on the Evolution of Brain Connectomics Project in primates.

Jacopo Baldi has won the fellowship at the doctoral School in Neuroscience Univeristy of Lyon 1. This year there were very few fellowships available. His research project will be on the coding of social space in free moving monkeys.

Given the great popularity of babyfoot at the ISC, our students have organized the first tournament. The winners of the tournament were Remi Philippe and Sebastien Kirchherr. The final was tough, against two outstanding challengers (Antoine Ameloot and Pier Ferrari).

In July, Remi Philippe defended his PhD thesis, "Neurocomputational approaches of social decision-making", supervised by Jean-Claude Dreher and Edmund Derrington! Bravo.