COGNITION AND ACTIONS

COGNITION AND ACTIONS

RESEARCH

Our research mostly focuses on the neural correlates of complex motor behavior in humans. Most daily life situations require making decisions about actions. The fluid and flexible manner with which we make such decisions indicates the operation of a selection process that takes into account multiple factors including perceptual evidence, biomechanical constraints, personal goals, contextual rules or the expected outcome of actions. A number of current projects are concerned with the study of how these factors are integrated during action selection and the role of inhibitory mechanisms during movement planning in this context.
Besides, another important research topic of our group revolves around the mechanisms by which the brain copes with the limited resources that are available to a living organism, being computational, energetic or otherwise. This encompasses our previous research topics, namely effort-based decision making, which consists in the processes involved in minimizing the effort cost of our decisions, and especially in the context of Parkinson disease but also mental fatigue, which can be viewed as a consequence of an excess of mental effort investment, visual selective attention, a process dealing with the allocation of limited visual resources to the most potentially relevant information, habitual learning, a process allowing us to learn how to behave in a complex environment while saving computational resources and finally, chunking, a mechanism originally viewed as a strategy aimed at reducing working memory load, but operational in many other behaviors, including sequence learning, language and perception.

The current projets are :

Inhibitory control of actions,
Integration of reward during action selection,
Selective attention and response selection during motor decision making,
Effort-based decision making,
Mental fatigue,
Visual selective attention,
Chunking and sequence learning.

Website: http://www.coactionslab.com

TEAM

Principal investigator

DUQUE Julie, PhD

Postdoctorate fellows

CARSTEN Thomas, Postdoctorate Fellow
DENYER Ronan, Postdoctorate Fellow
SHIYONG Su, Postdoctorate Fellow
YADAV Goldy, Postdoctorate Fellow

PhD students

BRACONNIER Clara, PhD Student
CHAISE Fostine, PhD Student
FIEVEZ Fanny, PhD Student
FUMERY Thibault, PhD Student
PATNAIK Mantosh, PhD Student

Technical and administrative staff

AZZAZ Leila, accountant
FRIAND Cathy, administrative assistant
JACOB Benvenuto, computer scientist
LAMBERT Julien, industrial engineer
ROUSSEAU Xavier, electronic technician

COLLABORATIONS

National collaborations

Dr. Pierre Maurage, Laboratory for experimental psychopathology, Université catholique de Louvain, Louvain-La-Neuve. http://uclep.be/members/pierre-maurage
Prof. Stephan Swinnen, Dept. Biomedische Kinesiologie, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Leuven. http://faber.kuleuven.be/english/research/dep2/mcn/control/
Prof. Philipe de Timary, Institute of Neuroscience, Université catholique de Louvain, Bruxelles. http://uclep.be/members/philippe-de-timary

International collaborations

Prof. Peter Brown, University of Oxford, UK. http://www.clneuro.ox.ac.uk/team/principal-investigators/peter-brown
Prof. Brian Corneil, Robarts Research Institute, Canada. http://bmi.ssc.uwo.ca/CorneilLab.org/Corneil_Lab/Home.html
Dr. Alexandre Eusebio, PhD, Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone. Marseille, France. http://www.int.univ-amu.fr/Eusebio-Alexandre
Prof. Luciano Fadiga, IIT, Italian Institute of Technology. RBCS, Robotics, Brain and Cognitive Sciences Department, Italy. http://www.iit.it/
Prof. Richard Ivry, Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute and Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, USA. http://ivrylab.berkeley.edu
Prof. Henry Kennedy, Inserm u846, Stem-Cell and Brain Research Institute, Lyon, France. http://www.sbri.fr/
Prof. Rich Krauzlis, Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research. National Institutes of Health, Maryland, USA. http://www.nei.nih.gov/intramural/lsr/krauzlis/krauzlis.asp