Stanislas Dehaene
Encyclopedia
Stanislas Dehaene is a professor at the Collège de France
, author, and (since 1989) director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging,". He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition
, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlate
s of consciousness
. Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the James S. McDonnell Foundation
Centennial Fellowship in 1999 for his work on the "Cognitive Neuroscience of Numeracy". In 2003, together with Denis Le Bihan, Dehaene was awarded the Louis D. Prize from the Institut de France
.
in Paris from 1984-1989. He obtained his Masters degree in Applied mathematics and computer science in 1985 from the University of Paris VI. He turned to neuroscience and psychology after reading Jean-Pierre Changeux
's book, L'Homme neuronal (Neuronal Man: The Biology of The Mind). Inspired by his reading of Changeux's work, Dehaene began collaborate with him on computational neuronal models of human cognition, including working memory and task control, collaborations which continue to the present day. Dehaene then completed his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1989 with Jacques Mehler
at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
(EHESS), Paris. After receiving his doctorate, Dehaene became a research scientist at INSERM in the Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics Laboratory (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique) directed by Mehler. He also spent two years, from 1992-1994, as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, with Michael Posner
at the University of Oregon
. Dehaene then returned to France, where he began his own research group, which today numbers nearly 30 graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers. In 2005, he was elected to the newly created Chair of Experimental Psychology at the Collège de France
.
, a discipline which he popularized and synthesized with the publication of his 1997 book, The Number Sense (La Bosse des maths) which won the Prix Jean Rostand for best French language general-audience scientific book. He began his studies of numerical cognition with Jacques Mehler, examining the cross-linguistic frequency of number words, whether numbers were understood in an analog or compositional manner, and the connection between numbers and space (the "SNARC effect"). With Changeux, he then developed a computational model of numerical abilities, which predicted log-gaussian tuning functions for number neurons, a finding which has now been elegantly confirmed with single-unit physiology With long-time collaborator Laurent Cohen, a neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital
in Paris, Dehaene also identified patients with lesions in different regions of the parietal lobe
with impaired multiplication, but preserved subtraction (associated with lesions of the inferior parietal lobule) and others with impaired subtraction, but preserved multiplication (associated with lesions to the intraparietal sulcus). This double dissociation
suggested that different neural subtrates for overlearned, linguistically mediated calculations, like multiplication, are mediated by inferior parietal regions, while on-line computations, like subtraction are mediated by the intraparietal sulcus. Shortly thereafer, Dehaene began EEG and functional neuroimaging
studies of these capacities, showing that parietal and frontal regions were specifically involved in mathematical cognition, including the dissociation between subtraction and multiplication observed in his previous patient studies.
, leading to numerous scientific articles, an edited book, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
" and is the Past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
. Dehaene has developed computational models of consciousness, based on Bernard Baars
Global Workspace Theory
, which suggest that only one piece of information can gain access to a "global neuronal workspace". To explore the neural basis of this global neuronal workspace, he has conducted functional neuroimaging
experiments of masking and the attentional blink
, which show that information that reaches conscious awareness leads to increased activation in a network of parietal
and frontal
regions.
inferior temporal cortex for reading written words. They identified a region they called the "visual word form area" (VWFA) that was consistently activated during reading, and also found that when this region was surgically removed to treat patient with intractable epilepsy
, reading abilities were severely impaired. Dehaene, Cohen and colleagues have subsequently demonstrated that, rather than being a single area, the VWFA is the highest stage in a hierarchy of visual feature extraction for letter and word recognition. More recently, they have turned their attention to how learning to read may depend on a process of "neuronal recycling" that causes brain circuits originally evolved for object recognition to become tuned to recognize frequent letters, pairs of letters and words, and have tested these ideas examining brain responses in a group of adults who did not learn to read due to social and cultural constraints.
, PLoS Biology
, and Developmental Science.
Collège de France
The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...
, author, and (since 1989) director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging,". He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition
Numerical cognition
Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental...
, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlate
Neural correlate
A neural correlate of a content of experience is any bodily component, such as an electro-neuro-biological state or the state assumed by some biophysical subsystem of the brain, whose presence necessarily and regularly correlates with such a specific content of experience.When the full ontological...
s of consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
. Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the James S. McDonnell Foundation
James S. McDonnell Foundation
The James S. McDonnell Foundation was founded in 1950 by aerospace pioneer James S. McDonnell. It was established to "improve the quality of life," and does so by contributing to the generation of new knowledge through its support of research and scholarship. Originally called the McDonnell...
Centennial Fellowship in 1999 for his work on the "Cognitive Neuroscience of Numeracy". In 2003, together with Denis Le Bihan, Dehaene was awarded the Louis D. Prize from the Institut de France
Institut de France
The Institut de France is a French learned society, grouping five académies, the most famous of which is the Académie française.The institute, located in Paris, manages approximately 1,000 foundations, as well as museums and chateaux open for visit. It also awards prizes and subsidies, which...
.
Training
Dehaene began his training as a mathematician, studying mathematics at the Ecole Normale SupérieureÉcole Normale Supérieure
The École normale supérieure is one of the most prestigious French grandes écoles...
in Paris from 1984-1989. He obtained his Masters degree in Applied mathematics and computer science in 1985 from the University of Paris VI. He turned to neuroscience and psychology after reading Jean-Pierre Changeux
Jean-Pierre Changeux
Jean-Pierre Changeux is a French neuroscientist known for his research in several fields of biology, from the structure and function of proteins , to the early development of the nervous system up to cognitive functions...
's book, L'Homme neuronal (Neuronal Man: The Biology of The Mind). Inspired by his reading of Changeux's work, Dehaene began collaborate with him on computational neuronal models of human cognition, including working memory and task control, collaborations which continue to the present day. Dehaene then completed his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1989 with Jacques Mehler
Jacques Mehler
Born in Barcelona in 1936, Jacques Mehler is an influential cognitive psychologist specializing in language acquisition.Mehler studied in the 1960s at Harvard University, at the time of the cognitive revolution, where he worked with George A. Miller...
at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales
The École des hautes études en sciences sociales is a leading French institution for research and higher education, a Grand Établissement. Its mission is research and research training in the social sciences, including the relationship these latter maintain with the natural and life sciences...
(EHESS), Paris. After receiving his doctorate, Dehaene became a research scientist at INSERM in the Cognitive Sciences and Psycholinguistics Laboratory (Laboratoire de Sciences Cognitives et Psycholinguistique) directed by Mehler. He also spent two years, from 1992-1994, as a post-doctoral fellow at the Institute of Cognitive and Decision Sciences, with Michael Posner
Michael Posner (psychologist)
Michael I. Posner is the editor of numerous cognitive and neuroscience compilations and is an eminent researcher in the field of attention...
at the University of Oregon
University of Oregon
-Colleges and schools:The University of Oregon is organized into eight schools and colleges—six professional schools and colleges, an Arts and Sciences College and an Honors College.- School of Architecture and Allied Arts :...
. Dehaene then returned to France, where he began his own research group, which today numbers nearly 30 graduate students, post-doctoral fellows and researchers. In 2005, he was elected to the newly created Chair of Experimental Psychology at the Collège de France
Collège de France
The Collège de France is a higher education and research establishment located in Paris, France, in the 5th arrondissement, or Latin Quarter, across the street from the historical campus of La Sorbonne at the intersection of Rue Saint-Jacques and Rue des Écoles...
.
Numerical cognition
Dehaene is best-known for his work on numerical cognitionNumerical cognition
Numerical cognition is a subdiscipline of cognitive science that studies the cognitive, developmental and neural bases of numbers and mathematics. As with many cognitive science endeavors, this is a highly interdisciplinary topic, and includes researchers in cognitive psychology, developmental...
, a discipline which he popularized and synthesized with the publication of his 1997 book, The Number Sense (La Bosse des maths) which won the Prix Jean Rostand for best French language general-audience scientific book. He began his studies of numerical cognition with Jacques Mehler, examining the cross-linguistic frequency of number words, whether numbers were understood in an analog or compositional manner, and the connection between numbers and space (the "SNARC effect"). With Changeux, he then developed a computational model of numerical abilities, which predicted log-gaussian tuning functions for number neurons, a finding which has now been elegantly confirmed with single-unit physiology With long-time collaborator Laurent Cohen, a neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital
Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital
The Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital is a teaching hospital located in Paris, France. Part of the Assistance publique - Hôpitaux de Paris, it is one of Europe's largest hospitals...
in Paris, Dehaene also identified patients with lesions in different regions of the parietal lobe
Parietal lobe
The parietal lobe is a part of the Brain positioned above the occipital lobe and behind the frontal lobe.The parietal lobe integrates sensory information from different modalities, particularly determining spatial sense and navigation. For example, it comprises somatosensory cortex and the...
with impaired multiplication, but preserved subtraction (associated with lesions of the inferior parietal lobule) and others with impaired subtraction, but preserved multiplication (associated with lesions to the intraparietal sulcus). This double dissociation
Dissociation (neuropsychology)
In neuropsychology, dissociation involves identifying the neural substrate of a particular brain function through identification of case studies, neuroimaging, or neuropsychological testing.-Single dissociation:...
suggested that different neural subtrates for overlearned, linguistically mediated calculations, like multiplication, are mediated by inferior parietal regions, while on-line computations, like subtraction are mediated by the intraparietal sulcus. Shortly thereafer, Dehaene began EEG and functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions...
studies of these capacities, showing that parietal and frontal regions were specifically involved in mathematical cognition, including the dissociation between subtraction and multiplication observed in his previous patient studies.
Consciousness
Dehaene subsequently turned his attention to work on the neural correlates of consciousnessNeural correlates of consciousness
The neural correlates of consciousness constitute the minimal set of neuronal events and mechanisms sufficient for a specific conscious percept. Neuroscientists use empirical approaches to discover neural correlates of subjective phenomena...
, leading to numerous scientific articles, an edited book, "The Cognitive Neuroscience of Consciousness
Consciousness
Consciousness is a term that refers to the relationship between the mind and the world with which it interacts. It has been defined as: subjectivity, awareness, the ability to experience or to feel, wakefulness, having a sense of selfhood, and the executive control system of the mind...
" and is the Past President of the Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness
The Association for the Scientific Study of Consciousness is a professional membership organization that aims to encourage research on consciousness in cognitive science, neuroscience, philosophy, and other relevant disciplines in the sciences and humanities, directed toward understanding the...
. Dehaene has developed computational models of consciousness, based on Bernard Baars
Bernard Baars
Bernard J. Baars is a former Senior Fellow in Theoretical Neurobiology at The Neurosciences Institute in La Jolla, CA., and is currently an Affiliated Fellow there. He is best known as the originator of the global workspace theory, a theory of human cognitive architecture and consciousness...
Global Workspace Theory
Global Workspace Theory
Global Workspace Theory is a simple Cognitive architecture that has been developed to account qualitatively for a large set of matched pairs of conscious and unconscious processes. It was proposed by Bernard Baars...
, which suggest that only one piece of information can gain access to a "global neuronal workspace". To explore the neural basis of this global neuronal workspace, he has conducted functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging
Functional neuroimaging is the use of neuroimaging technology to measure an aspect of brain function, often with a view to understanding the relationship between activity in certain brain areas and specific mental functions...
experiments of masking and the attentional blink
Attentional blink
Attentional blink is a phenomenon observed in rapid serial visual presentation . When presented with a sequence of visual stimuli in rapid succession at the same spatial location on a screen, a participant will often fail to detect a second salient target occurring in succession if it is presented...
, which show that information that reaches conscious awareness leads to increased activation in a network of parietal
Parietal lobe
The parietal lobe is a part of the Brain positioned above the occipital lobe and behind the frontal lobe.The parietal lobe integrates sensory information from different modalities, particularly determining spatial sense and navigation. For example, it comprises somatosensory cortex and the...
and frontal
Frontal lobe
The frontal lobe is an area in the brain of humans and other mammals, located at the front of each cerebral hemisphere and positioned anterior to the parietal lobe and superior and anterior to the temporal lobes...
regions.
Neural basis of reading
In addition, Dehaene has used brain imaging to study language processing in monolingual and bilingual subjects, and in collaboration with Laurent Cohen, the neural basis of reading. Dehaene and Cohen initially focused on the role of ventral stream regions in visual word recognition, and in particular the role of the leftLateralization of brain function
A longitudinal fissure separates the human brain into two distinct cerebral hemispheres, connected by the corpus callosum. The sides resemble each other and each hemisphere's structure is generally mirrored by the other side. Yet despite the strong anatomical similarities, the functions of each...
inferior temporal cortex for reading written words. They identified a region they called the "visual word form area" (VWFA) that was consistently activated during reading, and also found that when this region was surgically removed to treat patient with intractable epilepsy
Epilepsy
Epilepsy is a common chronic neurological disorder characterized by seizures. These seizures are transient signs and/or symptoms of abnormal, excessive or hypersynchronous neuronal activity in the brain.About 50 million people worldwide have epilepsy, and nearly two out of every three new cases...
, reading abilities were severely impaired. Dehaene, Cohen and colleagues have subsequently demonstrated that, rather than being a single area, the VWFA is the highest stage in a hierarchy of visual feature extraction for letter and word recognition. More recently, they have turned their attention to how learning to read may depend on a process of "neuronal recycling" that causes brain circuits originally evolved for object recognition to become tuned to recognize frequent letters, pairs of letters and words, and have tested these ideas examining brain responses in a group of adults who did not learn to read due to social and cultural constraints.
Editorial assignments
Dehaene is an associate editor of the journal Cognition, and a member of the editorial board of several other journals, including NeuroImageNeuroImage
NeuroImage is a scientific journal in the neuroimaging field. It publishes neuroscientific as well as methodological papers, often about functional neuroimaging and functional human brain mapping. When Karl J...
, PLoS Biology
PLoS Biology
PLoS Biology is a peer-reviewed scientific journal covering all aspects of biology. Publication began on October 13, 2003.It was the first journal of the Public Library of Science. All content in PLoS Biology is published under the Creative Commons "by-attribution" license...
, and Developmental Science.
External links
- Laboratory Website
- College de France Entry
- Biography from the Edge Foundation