COGNITION AND ACTION

COGNITION AND ACTION

RESEARCH

The purpose of our research is to investigate the relation between motor control and high cognitive functions, such as language, number representation, tool use and decision making. These cognitive functions are distinctive of human beings but, clearly, they appeared much too recently to have exerted an evolutionary pressure on the development of new specialized areas in the human brain. Yet, it is remarkable to find a rather consistent organization of the neural representations of these cognitive functions, with so little cross-cultural and cross-individual variation. To explain this invariability, it has been proposed that these cognitive representations arose, with minimal transformations, from phylogenetically older maps already present in the brain of non-human primates, and involved in more elementary functions. Interestingly, most of the cortical brain areas which have been "recycled" in the course of evolution in order to house high cognitive functions are motor-related areas. Exploring the tight relation between the neuronal correlates of action and cognition, their functional consequences, and the possible interference between these, apparently very distinct, systems constitutes one important research line in the laboratory. Another research line focuses more specifically on action-based decision making. At every moment, we have to make decisions about potential actions. The fluid and flexible manner with which we make such decisions indicates the operation of a selection process that takes into account multiple factors including perceptual evidence, personal goals, contextual rules or the expected outcome of actions. A number of current projects are concerned with the study of how these factors are integrated in the context of action-based decision making.

The current projets are :

The role of inhibitory mechanisms in action selection and initiation,
The impact of cognitive variables on motor excitability during action selection,
The interactions between "selective attention" and "response selection" processes,
The generic function of Broca's area as a syntactic processor,
Role of Broca's area in motor learning,
Causal contribution of premotor areas to number representations,
The contribution of motor-related areas to tool use representation,
Neural correlates of decision-making.

Collaborations linked to these projects are :