Colloques du Collège de France - Collège de France

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Perception and ConsciousnessNeural Mechanisms of Conscious Visual Perception in HumansColloque - Biyu Jade He : Neural Mechanisms of Conscious Visual Perception in HumansBiyu Jade HeRésuméIn this talk, I will discuss insights from our recent work probing the neural mechanisms underlying conscious visual perception in humans by leveraging multimodal neuroimaging and computational approaches. I will focus on the roles of slow cortical potentials and spontaneous ongoing brain activity as revealed by our recent empirical work. I will also discuss neural and computational mechanisms underpinning humans' remarkable one-shot learning capability in visual perception, as well as how lifelong prior knowledge influences conscious perception.

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Perception and ConsciousnessThe Global Workspace Model of Consciousness: Then and NowColloque - Claire Sergent : The Global Workspace Model of Consciousness: Then and NowClaire Sergent

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Numerical and Mathematical DevelopmentThe Relationship Between The Approximate Number System (ANS) And Math Cognition—Evidence From Across Several ContinentsColloque - Justin Halberda : The Relationship Between The Approximate Number System (ANS) And Math Cognition—Evidence From Across Several ContinentsJustin HalberdaRésuméWhat might be the relationship between our fanciest, most-recent cognitive inventions (e.g., Formal Mathematics) and our most evolutionarily ancient abilities to approximate the world (e.g., The Approximate Number System)? I will review the field's evidence, highlighting data from across 4 Continents.

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Infancy, Development, and EducationDevelopmental Origins of Human CuriosityColloque - Lisa Feigenson : Developmental Origins of Human CuriosityLisa FeigensonRésuméCuriosity underpins the greatest of human achievements, from exploring the reaches of our solar system to discovering the structure of our own minds.  Where does this drive come from?  Here I suggest that far from being reliant on language and sophisticated metacognitive skills, curiosity is present from our earliest days.  In support of this claim, I discuss work showing that preverbal infants not only experience curiosity but harness it: when babies' predictions fail to accord with their observations, they look longer, learn more, and produce exploratory behaviors.  Critically, their exploration is guided by a desire to explain—long before they have the words to describe what they see, babies seek to understand why things happen as they do. In this sense, the curiosity that emerges in infancy lays the foundation for a lifetime of discovery. 

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Infancy, Development, and EducationThe state of the State of the Arts of the Language of thought Colloque - Luca Bonatti : The state of the State of the Arts of the Language of thought Luca BonattiRésuméI will revise the state of the art of the current evidence for Language of thought. I will focus on the identification of primitive operation in early infancy, and will speculate on the relation between natural language and logical primitives.

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Perception and ConsciousnessBuilding a Theory of Consciousness, One Collaboration at a TimeColloque - Lucia Melloni : Building a Theory of Consciousness, One Collaboration at a TimeLucia MelloniRésuméWhat does it take to transform consciousness from a philosophical puzzle into a scientific theory? Few frameworks have shaped this quest as deeply as Stanislas Dehaene's Global Neuronal Workspace Theory (GNWT). By proposing that conscious access arises through large-scale broadcasting and ignition across fronto-parietal networks, GNWT provided both a conceptual framework and concrete, testable predictions

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Perception and ConsciousnessThe Global Neuronal Workspace from the Molecular to the Cognitive Level: Consequences for Pathology and PharmacologyColloque - Jean-Pierre Changeux : The Global Neuronal Workspace from the Molecular to the Cognitive Level: Consequences for Pathology and PharmacologyJean-Pierre ChangeuxRésuméThe global neuronal workspace (GNW) theory originates from decades-long productive dialogs between Dehaene & Changeux which aimed, in the late 80's, at the elaboration of formal neuronal networks of cognitive functions. They initially included birdsong learning by selection, the Wisconsin card sorting task, infants numerosity detection...All these models were grounded on a molecular level which included allosteric neurotransmitter receptors. In 1998, the "global neuronal workspace" was integrated into a formal organism in order to pass the effort-full, "conscious", Stroop task. It was postulated to consist of a brain-scale—multimodal & horizontal—network of widely distributed neurons with long axon neurons, distinct from modality-specific localized non-conscious processors, including neurons which included the prefontal, parieto-temporal, cingulate… areas. The access of an outside representation to the conscious workspace would manifest itself by an "ignition" of the workspace network. At this stage, an important number of imaging and electrophysiological data appear consistent with the GNW theory. In this contribution, emphasis shall be given to the bottomup contribution of the molecular level and its consequences for the understanding of neuropsychiatric diseases and rational drug design, in the larger context of a novel precision pharmacology.

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Infancy, Development, and EducationDiscovering Combinatorial Affordances of Elements to Form Gestalts: Learning to "See Ideas via Groupitizing and Visual Word FormsColloque - Bruce McCandliss : Discovering Combinatorial Affordances of Elements to Form Gestalts: Learning to "See Ideas via Groupitizing and Visual Word FormsBruce McCandlissRésuméEarly education is a time of transformation in the way children come to see ideas in the world in the world, partly by a process of learning to combine visual elements to form gestalts. In this talk, I will expand upon these combinatorial learning phenomena across two systems that are transformed in the mind and brain by education. First, I will review research on groupitizing, the ability of children to combine their knowledge of small subitizable sets to access the cardinal value of larger sets, and how this emerging ability is intrinsically linked to educational achievement and potentially linked to individual differences in the organization of cortical activity. Secondly, I will review research on the cognitive and neural basis of learning to see visual word forms via combinations of letters, a process also intrinsically linked to success in education. 

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Numerical and Mathematical DevelopmentPattern Codes for Numerical Quantity during Perception and Internal Computation in the Human BrainColloque - Evelyn Eger : Pattern Codes for Numerical Quantity during Perception and Internal Computation in the Human BrainEvelyn EgerRésuméDuring the last two decades, neuroimaging has generated a wealth of knowledge on how number processing inserts itself into the functional neuroanatomy of the human brain. We understand quite well now what are the cortical areas involved, and the neural codes for individual quantities as perceptual entities. Still, we lack a general understanding of how quantity representations are transformed during mental computations, and how or even where results of such computations are coded in the brain. By using ultra-high-field (UHF) imaging during an approximate calculation task designed to disentangle in- and outputs of a computation from the operation, we uncovered a representation of internally generated quantities which was most prominent in higher-level regions like the angular gyrus and lateral prefrontal cortex, and the intra-parietal sulcus. Intraparietal sensory-motor integration regions were the only ones found to share the same representational space for stimulus-evoked and internally generated quantities. This suggests the transformation may occur in these regions, before result numbers are maintained for task purposes in higher-level areas in a format possibly detached from sensory-evoked inputs. Results illustrate the power of UHF imaging to finely characterize neural codes underlying human numerical abilities with non-invasive methods.

Stanislas DehaeneChaire Psychologie cognitive expérimentaleAnnée 2025-2026Collège de FranceColloque : Seeing the Mind, Educating the BrainTheme: Numerical and Mathematical DevelopmentSpatiotemporal Dynamics of Arithmetic Computation in the Human BrainColloque - Pedro Pinheiro-Chagas : Spatiotemporal Dynamics of Arithmetic Computation in the Human BrainPedro Pinheiro-ChagasRésuméMathematics is among humanity's most remarkable achievements, yet we still lack a comprehensive understanding of how the brain performs even simple arithmetic. In this talk, I will present a series of studies investigating the encoding of elementary math, as well as the architecture, spatiotemporal dynamics, and causal role of the underlying brain networks. I will show that arithmetic computations selectively activate a distinct network in the human brain, which dissociates from language areas and overlaps with regions related to object recognition, visuospatial attention, working memory and relational reasoning. Next, using machine learning and intracranial recordings in humans, I will demonstrate how we can precisely track the cascade of unfolding representational codes during mental arithmetic, shedding light on the roles of each hub of the math network. Overall, this talk will provide insights into how elementary math concepts are implemented in the brain and, more broadly, show how the case study of math cognition can help us understand the algorithms of human intelligence.