Bodies interacting in vision

Time: 12 PM, BST Time (UK,...), 1 PM, Central European Time (France, Spain, Italy...) on the 31 st march.

Abstract:

A common view is that sociality has contributed to shape the functioning of high-level cognitive systems. I will discuss how sociality has also re-shaped the functioning of visual perception (and visual brain areas), making it highly specialized and sophisticated. I will present a set of studies using behavioral and neuroimaging methodologies on human adults and preverbal infants. Going beyond the visual specialization for faces and bodies, the results of those studies demonstrate the existence of visual perceptual mechanisms dedicated to processing multiple faces/bodies. These mechanisms can explain how the representation of social interaction emerges from object perception, through the analysis of spatial relationships between multiple faces and bodies in a visual scene.

About the speaker:

Liuba Papeo is a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in Neuroscience (International School for Advanced Studies, SISSA, Trieste, Italy), Directrice de Recherche (Full professor) at the CNRS in France.

Her PhD thesis addressed the role of modality-specific sensory-motor systems in higher-level processes such as conceptual knowledge and word understanding, using lesion studies and behavioral tests on brain-damaged patients, non-invasive brain stimulation (TMS) and functional neuroimaging (fMRI). The thesis received two prizes, from the Italian Association of Psychology and from the International School for Advanced Studies of Trieste (2011).

In 2011, she was awarded a “Marie Curie International Outgoing Fellowship”, which funded three years of postdoc at the Department of Psychology of Harvard University. Here, in collaboration with Prof. Alfonso Caramazza and Alvaro Pascual-Leone (Harvard Medical School), she studied the network dynamics supporting language and concepts. In 2014, she obtained a fellowship from the UPFellows Cofund Program of the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona and the European Research Council, for a four-years research program on the cognitive and neural mechanisms for action understanding, carried out at the University Pompeu Fabra of Barcelona.

She was recruited as tenured researcher by the CNRS and joined the Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod in 2016. In 2017, I obtained a European Research Council Starting grant. At the CNRS, I have developed a research program on the representation of relations, and established the research team “Cognitive neurodevelopment”. Since 2019, our team is member of the Laboratoire d’Excellence (LabEX) CORTEX of the University of Lyon. Since 2021, she is Directrice de Recherche (Full professor) at the CNRS. As a researcher, she is committed to contributing to scientific advancements as well as to using my role and position to increase equality and inclusion. The latter goal is as important to me as the former.

About the discussant:

Alice Gomez is a cognitive neuroscientist with a PhD in the neurospychology of memory (University Grenoble Alpes). She is an Assistant Professor in cognitive psychology at University Lyon 1. After her Ph.D, Alice stayed as a postdoc at Unicog, INSERM to study children with Developmental Coordination Disorder. In 2011 She joined the Institute of Cognitve Science Marc Jeannerod where she studied motor awareness in children then she moved to the Center of Research in Neuroscience where she won a National Grant to study Body representation in typical and atypical motor development.