Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a full-time Associate Researcher at INSERM U992, Paris, France, where she investigates the development of cognitive functions with brain imaging techniques. Originally qualified as MD, Pediatrician, she received her PhD from the EHESS, Paris, France. The goal of her research is to study the brain functional organization at the beginning of life in order to understand how complex cognitive functions, such as language, music, mathematics, etc… emerge in the human brain. Following up on François Jacob’s intuition that evolution was a tinkerer, twisting old machineries to give rise to new functions, her approach is to examine the primitive functions that are accessible to the human brain to process the external word at the beginning of life, then to study how initial biaises in brain organization are shaped by the human environment to give rise to the mature state. Her pioneering work studying language acquisition with new techniques as such high-density event-related potentials, functional resonance magnetic imaging or optical topography, has impacted the developmental neuroscience.

Talk Title: Cerebral constraints on learning.

Date: March, 16th

Time: 11:00 – 12:00