BaNCo

Neural bases of Communication

«We investigate the cerebral bases of communication via neuroimaging techniques» – Pascal belin

ResearchMembersPublications

Team website : https://neuralbasesofcommunication.eu/

Verbal communication, which relies on language and speech, is the most obvious form of human communication. However, a large part of our social interactions is based on non-verbal communication. This includes not only the analysis of various environmental characteristics but also the extraction of essential social information from the voice, such as age, gender, identity, and the emotional expressions of others.

Thanks to millions of years of evolution, the human brain, as well as that of other primates, has an extraordinary ability to extract, process, and interpret information from multiple sensory sources. The research projects conducted by the ‘Neural Bases of Communication’ (BaNCo) team are structured around three main areas aimed at understanding and modelling the processing of signals, primarily auditory, involved in communication processes:

1. Assessing neural bases

2. Measuring Behavioral and Social Responses

This axis explores the behavioral and social responses to auditory communication signals through behavioral manipulations, experiments with robots, and psychoacoustic studies, in order to better understand how the properties of sensory flows impact behavior and communication in both passive listening situations and interactive situations in humans and non-human primates.

3. Modeling Acoustic and Neural Sign

This section focuses on the computational modeling of both acoustic and neural signals. It includes work on signal processing, feature extraction, and artificial intelligence to analyze and model the sources and mechanisms involved in communication processes. These efforts provide analytical tools for research areas 1 and 2 and enable fundamental and applied advances in the mathematical and computational modeling of neural, perceptual, and cognitive processes.

Created in 2012 thanks to the “Emerging Team” program of the Foundation for Medical Research, the BANCO team has since received funding from the ANR, the ERC, and the A*Midex Foundation.