职位信息
现有法国科学院和巴黎大学神经科学和认知研究中心所长Florian Waszak先生与中国家留学基金管理委员会(CSC)正在联合招神经科学和认知方向的博士研究生。简要操作步骤说明文件可与yangqing165@hotmail.fr联系索取，相关博士培养或专业问题可与Florian Waszak先生直接联系f.waszak@gmx.net。
1.
About the project
Human action control: The role of reward and sleep in Stimulus-Response learning
Codirection：
Number of Months: 48 months
Doctor school: ED 158 - Cerveau, Cognition, Comportement
Institute and Team: Integrative Neuroscience and Cognition Center (INCC) https://incc-paris.fr
The INCC brings together research groups that address the question of how the brain generates its integrative functions, i.e., how it creates the mind and behavior. It gathers researchers who work on all three main targets of neuroscientific research: healthy humans (both adults and infants), patients, (with perceptual, motor, cognitive, psychiatric or neurologic impairments) and animal models. The research topics of the INCC are centered on three axes:
1- Perception, Cognition & Behavior
Almost all teams of the INCC are involved in research on how humans perceive, understand and interact with the environment. The teams that are most active on this axis are the Vision and the Spatial Orientation teams. The Vision team, investigates perceptual processing and how it interacts with other cognitive functions such as action, attention and decision making. It will also study how the cognitive system takes action decisions, choses appropriate actions and automatizes behaviour. The Spatial Orientation team will complement this research by investigating low-level motor functions like multisensory integration, gaze and posture control as well as, not surprisingly, spatial orientation.
2- Development & Plasticity
The teams that are most active on this axis are the Speech & Cognition and the Perception, Action, Cognition (PAC). The Speech & Cognition team studies the acquisition of spoken language. It also studies cognitive functions like the representations of space and quantities, as well as the interaction between language and cognition during development. The Perception, Action, Cognition team investigates the development and plasticity of perception-action and cognition in typical and atypical populations. A big asset of these teams, which makes their research entirely unique, is their collaboration with Paris hospitals (Port Royal, Necker, Bichat) which grants them access to newborns, sometimes only a few hours after birth. In addition, through the Vision and Cognition Unit (Fondation Rothschild, Chokron) the PAC group can run studies in adult and children brain-damaged subjects.
3- Neurophysiology & Neurological Diseases
Several INCC teams study the neural and glial basis of integrative brain functions as well as their cellular and molecular underpinnings, partially with a particular focus on pathological conditions. The teams most active on this axis are the Cerebral Dynamics, Plasticity, Learning team, the Glia-Glia and Glia-Neuron Interactions team, and the Pathophysiology of Psychiatric Disorders team. These teams investigate amongst others the role of astrocytes and SGC signaling in sensory processing, dynamics and information processing in visual cortex, functions and computations of the cerebellum and the basal ganglia. On the pathological side, they study notably Parkinson’s disease, autism, schizophrenia and depression with the goal of unraveling the synaptic and neural processes that are involved in the diseases.
The project will take place in the Vision Group of the INCC. Research conducted by the Vision Group is aimed at better understanding the mechanisms underlying perception, attention, consciousness and the links between perception and action. Our interests include the properties of visual attention and of spatial maps, visual perception during and across eye and head movements and visual motion perception. We also perform research on hearing and touch, especially their interactions with vision. We deploy multiple techniques ranging from behavioral methods such as psychophysics and eye tracking to brain imaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electro/magnetoencephalography (EEG/MEG) and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). We use decoding methods to better understand brain processes and for designing the online control of robotic upper limbs.
2.
Description of topic
Stimulus-Response (S-R) learning is used by humans to interact with their environment more efficiently. The current project investigates three factors that support this learning process. The first concerns the aspects of an S-R event that are preserved. Initially it was assumed that S-R learning is based on single associations between a stimulus and a motor output. In recent years, however, S-R learning has been shown to comprise at least two different processes. One refers to the actual action (e.g., left finger press) known as Stimulus-Action (S-A) association, the other refers to the task in which the S-R event takes place (in the current project a classification task, thus, Stimulus-Classification, S-C, association). It is assumed that, together, these memory traces not only ensure that sensorimotor events are performed more and more effortlessly, but they also warrant a certain flexibility, as some of the traces are independent of the particular action.
The current project studies the formation of these associations in the context of two other factors that drive learning: reward and sleep. According to reinforcement learning (RL) theory, reward strengthens behaviour when a reward is larger than expected (positive reward prediction error, RPE). The strength of RL lies in the fact that it makes precise and testable predictions. Sleep, on the other side, has been shown to support the consolidation of both declarative and non-declarative memories. It may not only prevent degradation of memories, but even enhance performance without further practice.
The project is a collaboration between the INCC in Paris (incc-paris.fr) and the Tübingen sleep lab (https://www.medizin.uni-tuebingen.de/de/404#opennewwindow) who have been working extensively on motor learning (and how it is influenced by reward) and sleep-dependent memory, respectively. The Paris lab has developed a paradigm that assesses S-A and S-C associations. This paradigm is particularly suitable for the study of several questions on the role of sleep and reward in motor learning. The Tübingen lab, on the other side, developed a plenitude of experimental paradigms to study the role of sleep in memory formation.
In the current project, the Tübingen and the Paris lab will be joining forces to run an integrated research programme that investigates S-R memory formation and how it is affected by reward and sleep consolidation. The project will study whether, and how, sleep is involved in the consolidation of S-A and S-C associations. It will show whether RL theory can account for episodic stimulus-response learning and whether RPE influences S-A learning, S-C learning, or both. It investigates also whether one or the other type of association, or both, benefits from sleep, it dissociates the influence of REM and non-REM sleep, and it studies the role of spindles and sharp wave-ripples in the consolidation process.
Required skills:
- strong background in cognitive neurosciences
- programming (matlab, python)
- knowledge in EEG recording and analysis
- good writing and presentation skills
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