Subventions et des contributions :

Subvention ou bourse octroyée s'appliquant à plus d'un exercice financier. (2017-2018 à 2022-2023)

Face processing is one of the most important cognitive functions of the human brain and it is central to social cognition. From faces we can extract numerous information such as the identity of a person, her age, gender, what she might be feeling based on her facial expressions or what she might be attending to based on where she is looking. Although faces are a class of visual objects, accumulating evidence suggests they are processed in a specific way and differently from other objects, with dedicated neural networks specific to the type of information extracted (identity, emotion etc.). It seems effortless to be able to recognise our friends and family members, or to decipher what they could be thinking and feeling by simply looking at their facial expressions. However, these fundamental cognitive abilities rely on very complex neural mechanisms that are still poorly understood. Impairments in these abilities, as seen in certain disorders such as autism, or as the result of brain injury, lead to dysfunctional social interactions, social isolation and lots of suffering. Understanding the neural mechanisms that underlie these cognitive processes in the intact brain is necessary to understand how these abilities go awry or break down in various disorders. My research program investigates the neural mechanisms involved in recognizing faces and facial expressions using eye movement monitoring and neural recordings through electroencephalography. In the short-term, I am focusing on the central role that the eyes play in these mechanisms and whether and how focusing on the eyes can improve the recognition of face identity or the recognition of facial expression of emotion. Project 1 will test the new model of early face perception that we recently developed and will characterize the workings of the neuro-cognitive eye region detector that we showed exists in the human brain. Project 2 will investigate the role of the eyes in the complex processes involved in face recognition while Project 3 will focus on the role of features in the neural processing of facial expressions. This research is important to understand better how these fundamental brain processes go awry in several clinical disorders in which the eyes are often avoided, as in autism. This fundamental research will enhance our current knowledge of brain mechanisms related to face perception, and more broadly vision, and has important clinical implications. Students will receive a multidisciplinary training in Cognitive Neuroscience, spanning the wide fields of perception, cognition and emotion, and will gain unique skills in the use of sophisticated brain and behaviour techniques that they can transfer to industry if they do not continue in academia (e.g. companies specialized in research-oriented devices including EEG and eye-tracking systems, market research companies).