Psychologie cognitive expérimentale - Stanislas Dehaene
Collège de France
La mission de ce laboratoire est d'analyser les bases cérébrales des fonctions cognitives, chez l'homme normal et chez certains patients neurologiques, en développant et en exploitant les méthodes modernes de la neuro-imagerie conjointement à l'utilisation de paradigmes expérimentaux issus de la psychologie cognitive. Stanislas Dehaene est ancien élève de l'École normale supérieure et docteur en psychologie cognitive. En septembre 2005, il a été nommé professeur au Collège de France, sur la chaire nouvellement créée de Psychologie cognitive expérimentale, après avoir occupé pendant près de dix ans la fonction de directeur de recherche à l'Inserm. Ses recherches visent à élucider les bases cérébrales des opérations les plus fondamentales du cerveau humain : lecture, calcul, raisonnement, prise de conscience. Ses travaux ont été récompensés par plusieurs prix et subventions, dont le prix Louis D. de la Fondation de France (avec D. Le Bihan), le prix Jean-Louis Signoret de la Fondation Ipsen et la centennial fellowship de la fondation américaine McDonnell.Les nombres dans le cerveauStanislas Dehaene est l'expert reconnu des bases cérébrales des opérations mathématiques, domaine dont il a été le pionnier. Il a conçu de nouveaux tests psychologiques de calcul et de compréhension des nombres, et les a appliqués aux patients atteints de lésions cérébrales et souffrant de troubles du calcul. Son travail a conduit à la découverte que l'intuition des nombres fait appel à des circuits particuliers du cerveau, en particulier ceux du lobe pariétal. Stanislas Dehaene a utilisé les méthodes d'imagerie cérébrale afin d'analyser l'organisation anatomique de ces circuits, mais aussi leur décours temporel, démontrant notamment dans un article paru dans Science en 1999 que le calcul approximatif fait appel à des régions partiellement différentes de celles du calcul exact. En collaboration avec le neurologue Laurent Cohen, il a observé de nouvelles pathologies de ces régions, qui conduisent certains patients « acalculiques » à perdre toute intuition du nombre. Il a également montré des homologies frappantes entre les traitements des nombres chez l'homme et chez l'animal. Ainsi, les fondements de nos capacités arithmétiques trouvent leur origine dans l'évolution du cerveau.Les travaux de Stanislas Dehaene montrent que des pathologies de la région pariétale, d'origine traumatique ou génétique, peuvent exister chez l'enfant. Elles entraînent une « dyscalculie » – un trouble précoce du développement comparable à la dyslexie, mais affectant l'intuition du nombre. Le diagnostic, la compréhension et la rééducation de la dyscalculie, par le biais de logiciels de jeux éducatifs, constituent des objectifs majeurs du laboratoire. Stanislas Dehaene a résumé ses recherches sur le cerveau et les mathématiques dans un livre à destination du grand public : La Bosse des maths (Éditions Odile Jacob ; Prix Jean Rostand en 1997), dont une édition révisée a été publiée en 2010.
Episodes
Mentioned books
Oct 1, 2025 • 47min
Colloque - Elizabeth Spelke : Educability
Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 2: Training and Educating the BrainEducabilityColloque - Elizabeth Spelke : EducabilityElizabeth Spelke
Oct 1, 2025 • 40min
Colloque - Lionel Naccache : Exploring Consciousness at the Edge: Global Neuronal Workspace Framework & Neurology
Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 1: Seeing and Decoding the MindExploring Consciousness at the Edge: Global Neuronal Workspace Framework & NeurologyColloque - Lionel Naccache : Exploring Consciousness at the Edge: Global Neuronal Workspace Framework & NeurologyLionel NaccacheRésuméAfter a brief synthetic introduction to the Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theoretical framework, I will show how the exploration of conscious state and conscious access in extreme neurological or physiological conditions can be mutually beneficial by: (i) improving medical and ethical care of patients, and (ii) enriching cognitive neuroscience of consciousness by testing key theoretical predictions in unusual situations. I will illustrate this bidirectional approach by focusing on Disorders of Consciousness (i.e.: vegetative states also coined unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, minimally conscious state and related conditions), but I will also address more briefly key recent findings in epilepsy, hemispherotomy and sleep.
Oct 1, 2025 • 39min
Colloque - Andreas Nieder : The Neuronal Basis of Numerical Cognition in Humans and Nonhuman Primates
Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 2: Training and Educating the BrainThe Neuronal Basis of Numerical Cognition in Humans and Nonhuman PrimatesColloque - Andreas Nieder : The Neuronal Basis of Numerical Cognition in Humans and Nonhuman PrimatesAndreas NiederInstitut de neurobiologie, département de biologie, université de Tübingen, AllemagneRésuméOur understanding of numbers, vital to our scientifically and technically advanced culture, has deep biological roots. Research across developmental psychology, anthropology, and animal cognition suggests that our ability to count symbolically arises from more primitive non-symbolic number representations. By studying single-neuron activity in associative brain areas of awake human patients and monkeys, we aim to uncover the physiological principles behind how numbers are represented in the brain. In both species, we've identified "number neurons" that encode set sizes regardless of how the stimuli are presented. These neurons play a crucial role in processing numerical information during goal-directed behavior. Moreover, investigating how numbers are processed in working memory offers insights into high-level cognitive control functions. Comparative research in numerical cognition is uniquely positioned to unravel the brain processes enabling humans to transition from nonsymbolic to symbolic representations, a hallmark of our species.
Oct 1, 2025 • 36min
Colloque - Jean-Rémi King : In Search of the Neural Code of Language
Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 2: Training and Educating the BrainIn Search of the Neural Code of LanguageColloque - Jean-Rémi King : In Search of the Neural Code of LanguageJean-Rémi KingRésuméHow does the brain transform words into meaning? By aligning insights from linguistics, neuroscience, and Large Language Models (LLMs), we observe that AI models and the human brain surprisingly converge on similar representational principles. Using neuroimaging and electrophysiology, we find that as LLMs improve at language tasks, their internal activations increasingly mirror cortical activity, and effectively enable us to decode meaning directly from these brain signals. Building on these results, we will outline a roadmap to uncover the neural code of language: (1) a benchmark dataset of brain recordings to build a "Rosetta Stone" across humans and models, (2) unique intracranial data from young children to characterize the computational principles of language development, and (3) a mathematical framework to understand the geometry of the neural representations of symbolic structures. Together, this research program moves us closer to deciphering how the human brain learns, represents and manipulates the structures of language.
Oct 1, 2025 • 38min
Colloque - Liping Wang : The Control of Sequence Working Memory in the Prefrontal Cortex
Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 1: Seeing and Decoding the MindThe Control of Sequence Working Memory in the Prefrontal CortexColloque - Liping Wang : The Control of Sequence Working Memory in the Prefrontal CortexLiping Wang
Oct 1, 2025 • 35min
Colloque - Pieter Roelfsema: Conscious Perception: The Propagation of Selection Signals through the Global Neuronal Workspace
Stanislas DehaenePsychologie cognitive expérimentaleCollège de FranceAnnée 2025-2026Colloque: Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 1: Seeing and Decoding the MindConscious Perception: The Propagation of Selection Signals through the Global Neuronal WorkspaceColloque - Pieter Roelfsema: Conscious Perception: The Propagation of Selection Signals through the Global Neuronal WorkspacePieter RoelfsemaNetherlands Institute for Neuroscience, Amsterdam & Institut de la Vision, ParisRésuméhe Global Neuronal Workspace (GNW) theory (Baars, 1988; Dehaene et al., 1998) proposes that information must be broadcast across widely distributed networks to enter conscious awareness. But what exactly is the information that is exchanged? I will argue that the GNW provides the substrate for the spread of selection signals and use this perspective to refine the distinction between access and phenomenal consciousness.Access consciousness corresponds to the information currently circulating within the GNW. In perception, this is the information selected by object-based attention, enabling a degree of representational flexibility that would otherwise not be attainable. In thought, access consciousness corresponds to the attended content of working memory, i.e. the items that can be actively transformed, combined, or used to retrieve associations. Phenomenal consciousness, by contrast, refers to the set of representations that are not yet part of the GNW, but that could be attended next because they are captured by the senses or because they are in an unattended memory form.I will illustrate these ideas in perception and memory. Perceptual experiments address the construction of coherent object representations through the spread of object-based attention, which at a neuronal level, corresponds to the spread of enhanced activity. In these studies, access consciousness aligns with object-based attention, and the GNW acts as the scaffold that allows selection signals to label all features of a perceptual object. This binding mechanism is incremental, time-consuming and explains why we consciously perceive unified, multi-feature objects.When considering memory, I will contrast iconic memory, supported by transient activity in early visual cortex, to working memory representations in higher areas that are maintained by persistent firing. Items in access awareness are attended within working memory and show stronger and more stable activity than non-attended items. I will show how the spread of selection signals among attended working memory items through the GNW supports conscious cognitive functions, such as resolving pronouns during reading and the retrieval of associations between concepts.Together, these findings suggest a revised view of the relationship between attention and consciousness, positioning the GNW as the orchestrator of distributed neuronal representations through the spread of attentional selection signals.
Oct 1, 2025 • 33min
Colloque - Nancy Kanwisher: Intuitive Physical Reasoning in the Human Brain
Stanislas DehaenePsychologie cognitive expérimentaleCollège de FranceAnnée 2025-2026Colloque: Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainPart 1: Seeing and Decoding the MindIntuitive Physical Reasoning in the Human BrainColloque - Nancy Kanwisher: Intuitive Physical Reasoning in the Human BrainNancy KanwisherMITRésuméVisual scene understand requires much more than a list of the objects present in the scene and their locations. To understanding a scene, plan action on it, and predict what will happen next we must extract the relationships between objects (e.g., support and attachment), their physical properties (e.g., mass and material), and the forces acting upon them. One view is that we do this with the use of a "mental physics engine" that represents this information and runs forward simulations to predict what will happen next. Over the last several years we have been testing this idea with Josh Tenenbaum using fMRI. I will review evidence that certain brain regions in the parietal and frontal lobes (but not the ventral visual pathway) behave as expected if they implement a mental physics engine: they respond more strongly when deciding about physical than visual properties and when viewing physical versus social stimuli (Fischer et al, 2016), and they contain scenario-invariant information about object mass inferred from motion trajectories (Schwettmann et al, 2019), the stability of a configuration of objects (Pramod et al, 2022), and whether two objects are in contact with each other (Pramod et al 2025). Most tellingly, we can decode predicted collision events from perceived collision events, as expected if these brain regions run forward simulations of what will happen next. I will discuss the scope of engagement of this system by not just rigid "Things" but fluid "Stuff" (Paulun et al 2025), and (at least under some circumstances) by language. I will argue that these findings (as well as the poor performance of deep net models on many intuitive physical tasks) provide preliminary evidence for a physics engine in the human parietal and frontal cortex.
Oct 1, 2025 • 24min
Colloque - Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain : Introduction
Stanislas DehaenePsychologie cognitive expérimentaleCollège de FranceAnnée 2025-2026Colloque: Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainStanislas Dehaene: IntroductionColloque en anglais.PrésentationOver the past decades, behavioral measures, brain imaging and neurophysiological recordings, in both humans and non-human primates, have led to major progress in understanding the neuronal and circuit-level properties that support cognitive functions such as visual recognition, spatial navigation and decision making. Human cognition is special, however, in its unique capacity to acquire new concepts and abilities through learning and education, particularly in the domain of language and mathematics. How far are we from understanding the neural mechanisms that allow us to acquire abstract concepts and symbols? Can we understand which cognitive toolkit is present in all brains since infancy, and how it changes with education? Can we separate the mechanisms of conscious and unconscious processing, and their respective contributions to human learning? To what extent does current animal research shed sufficient light on human computations? Are we still missing fundamental ideas, concepts, theories, and empirical tools to bridge between neuroscience and higher-level cognition? On the occasion of Stanislas' sixtieth birthday, he is delighted to invite some of the leading scientists—Jean-Pierre Changeux, Nancy Kanwisher, Elizabeth Spelke, Naama Friedmann, among others—who have played a key role in shaping his ideas.The program will feature discussions on the future of our field over the next two decades, along with a celebration of science, life, and friendship.
Jun 3, 2025 • 1h 13min
Conférence - Naama Friedmann : How the Same Dyslexia Manifests Itself in Different Languages
Stanislas DehaeneCollège de FrancePsychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2024-2025Conférence - Naama Friedmann : How the Same Dyslexia Manifests Itself in Different LanguagesNaama Friedmann est invitée par l'assemblée du Collège de France, sur proposition des professeurs Stanislas Dehaene, chaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentale et Luigi Rizzi, chaire Linguistique générale.Elle intervient dans le cadre d'une série de quatre conférences données en mai et juin 2025.
May 27, 2025 • 1h 11min
Conférence - Naama Friedmann : How Can Linguistic Theory Help Neurosurgeons: Language Assessment in Tumor-Removal Surgery for the Preservation of Patients' Language
Stanislas DehaeneCollège de FrancePsychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2024-2025Conférence - Naama Friedmann : How Can Linguistic Theory Help Neurosurgeons: Language Assessment in Tumor-Removal Surgery for the Preservation of Patients' LanguageNaama Friedmann est invitée par l'assemblée du Collège de France, sur proposition des professeurs Stanislas Dehaene, chaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentale et Luigi Rizzi, chaire Linguistique générale.Elle intervient dans le cadre d'une série de quatre conférences données en mai et juin 2025.
