Lucas Benjamin

Seeing the Mind, Educating the Brain

If you are in Paris on October 1-3 : we are organizing a fantastic cognitive neuroscience conference at Collège de France, on topics ranging from language to math, education and consciousness, with many of my favorite scientists !
Full program here:
www.unicog.org/seeing-the-m...

Some numbers seem to show up everywhere. Think of 10, 12, 24, 36...
Others—like 26 or 34—don’t get the same attention.Why? In our new paper with @standehaene.bsky.social and @mathiassablemeyer.bsky.social, we argue it's because of how the mind builds number concepts.
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doi.org/10.1016/j.co...

I'm very pleased to share our latest study:
‘Emergence of Language in the Developing Brain’,
by L Evanson, P Bourdillon et al:
- Paper: ai.meta.com/research/pub...
- Blog: ai.meta.com/blog/meta-fa...
- Thread below 👇

Deep bidirectional interplay between sensory integration and latent rule discovery https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.04.29.651167v1

Faut-il vraiment interdire les écrans avant six ans ? Les dessous d'une croisade qui part en vrille Selon notre chroniqueur Franck Ramus, spécialiste de ces questions, la tribune publiée le 29 avril et signée par cinq sociétés savantes est "tout sauf un argumentaire rigoureux fondé sur des…

La croisade anti-écrans part en vrille.
Pourquoi la tribune du 29 avril signée par cinq sociétés médicales est tout sauf un argumentaire rigoureux fondé sur des résultats probants.
Ma nouvelle chronique en libre accès dans l'Express:
www.lexpress.fr/sciences-san...

📢 New publication alert! 📢
👂Ever struggled to understand natural speech in a noisy environment? 🤔
Our new research shows that moving rhythmically can actually help you hear better!

royalsocietypublishing.org/eprint/ZWRPM...

with: @strijkers.bsky.social & Noémie teRietmolen

🧵👇

Hippocampal encoding of memories in human infants Humans lack memories for specific events from the first few years of life. We investigated the mechanistic basis of this infantile amnesia by scanning the brains of awake infants with functional magne...

Why do we not remember being a baby? One idea is that the hippocampus, which is essential for episodic memory in adults, is too immature to form individual memories in infancy. We tested this using awake infant fMRI, new in @science.org #ScienceResearch www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

PhD opportunity - ERC ThoughtOrigins We are seeking a graduate student in comparative cognition to work on a ERC-funded project (to Isabelle Dautriche) to investigate the format of thought in the absence of a language in two populations:...

I am looking for a PhD student to work on my ERC-funded project to investigate the format of thought in the absence of language in baboons and bees.

Details here: tinyurl.com/5ff9hcjj

Apply here: emploi.cnrs.fr/Offres/Docto...

A proposal for unifying statistical learning at different scales: Long-Horizon Associative Learning https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.03.12.642610v1

We are hiring! Come work in sunny Marseille!
NeuroSchool PhD contracts in neuroscience are available at Aix Marseille University, France:

I submitted one project (#11) for the call for international PhDs:
"Investigating Music Listening in Human and Non-Human Primates."

Splitting speech Newborn babies can recognise patterns in how voices alternate, as well as detect word-like motifs even when individual syllables are pronounced by various speakers.

@elife.bsky.social digest can be found here : elifesciences.org/digests/1018...

We also identified a specific ERP component, possibly an N400 precursor, only after newborns had been exposed to phonetic regularities, suggesting that these induced lexical search.

Frequency tagging analysis showed that statistical learning appears to be a general learning mechanism that operates over each dimension in which speech is factorised, generalising irrelevant variations on the other dimension.



Statistical learning beyond words in human neonates Human neonates process regularities in speech's phonetic and voice content in parallel, but only phonetic regularities evoke a specific ERP component in a post-learning phase.

Excited to share our new work led by Ana Fló!
We used EEG to show that from birth, human newborns can compute statistical regularities in various dimensions of language, in particular phonemes and voices.
elifesciences.org/articles/101...
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Splitting speech Newborn babies can recognise patterns in how voices alternate, as well as detect word-like motifs even when individual syllables are pronounced by various speakers.

Imagine listening to a language you don't know. When does one word end, and another begin? Human infants face a similar challenge. Scientists have looked at exactly how babies recognise patterns in speech from birth.

New paper from the lab!
Mathias Sablé-Meyer used behavior, fMRI and MEG to study the mental representation of geometric shapes (quadrilaterals ranging in regularity from squares and rectangles to random figures).
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Call for Projects : Postdoctoral Study grants Apply online until Monday, March 31, 2025. Opening on Monday, February 3 www.fondationfyssen.fr

Call for projects - Postdoctoral Study Grants 2025

The human auditory cortex concurrently tracks syllabic and phonemic timescales via acoustic spectral flux Human auditory cortex tracks specific acoustic features, providing a multiscale temporal template for subsequent speech parsing.

Merry Xmas to all my co-authors!
Excited to share our work in Science Advances:
"The human auditory cortex concurrently tracks syllabic and phonemic timescales via acoustic spectral flux."
www.science.org/doi/full/10....

New preprint! 🚨

Performance of standard reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms depends on the scale of the rewards they aim to maximize.
Inspired by human cognitive processes, we leverage a cognitive bias to develop scale-invariant RL algorithms: reward range normalization.
Curious? Have a read!👇

Statistical learning beyond words in human neonates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.26.605295v1 Interest in statistical learning in developmental studies stems from the observation that 8-month-ol

Statistical learning beyond words in human neonates https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.07.26.605295v1

Check out the new study led by Ana Fló :
«These results show that, from birth, multiple input regularities can be processed in parallel and feed different higher-order networks.»

Revised version soon in @elife.bsky.social