Seminar by CoMCo team 06/12/2024

Friday 6th December 2024, at 14:30, Henri Gastaut meeting room

Frédéric Ambroggi, Sabrina Ravel, Simon Nougaret

  (INT, équipe CoMCo)

Frédéric Ambroggi – Why do we move?
An extensive work from the CoMCo team has investigated ‘how’ we produce movements. My work focuses on the “why”. As animals, we rely on our actions to feed, drink, escape threats or reproduce. I will briefly discuss how incoming signals to the nucleus accumbens contribute to set the motivation to engage in food seeking. Then, I will present my project that aims to study the processes allowing animals to choose their goal when several are in competition.

Sabrina Ravel – How can we reconcile motor control and social interactions?
A lot of our social interactions depend on motor control and actions. The ability to interpret and reproduce those actions serves as a basis for adapted social interactions. One part of my project is to observe and analyze social interactions in marmoset family groups with babies, focusing on solicitation behaviors for grooming, play, or baby transfer. More specifically, one hypothesis is that those behaviors can be lateralized like communication gestures in baboons and that we could find anatomical correlates of such specialization.

Simon Nougaret – How do we learn from others?
Social learning is a powerful ability allowing individuals to learn the consequences of a behavior without direct experience but by observation of others. My research project aims at understanding the neural circuit underlying social learning. For this purpose, I combine electrophysiological and chemogenetical approaches in behaving non-human primates. My main hypothesis in that the structures representing the observed actions’ value, as the anterior cingulate cortex, will interact with the individual learning circuitry in subcortical structures, using the same neuromodulator activity, and allowing to learn socially.