The advent of new brain imaging techniques such as resting-state functional MRI (fMRI), has led to the need for new approaches to recover brain functional activations without a prior knowledge on the experimental paradigm, as it was the case for task-fMRI. Conventional methods, i.e. the general line...

International audience A few intriguing neuropsychologial studies report dissociations where agraphic patients are severely impaired for writing letters whereas they write digits nearly normally. Here, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) together with graphic tablet recordings, we tes...

Progressive intra-cerebral accumulation of amyloid peptides formed after sequential cleavage of the amyloid peptide precursor (APP) by secretases , is a central mecanism for Alzheimer’s disease. Therefore, a better understanding of APP regulation and homeostasy is now crucial. With this background,...

The experimental study of human memory has had two historic moments in the last sixty years. 1957 marks the discovery of the role of the medial temporal lobes in conscious learning. 1997 marks the discovery of two systems of declarative memory, namely episodic and semantic memories. These major brea...

This text is a progress report from the cognitive ACI. Reminder of the issues at stake and objectives The study of categorisation is a priority topic within the Toulouse Institute of Ceramic Sciences (IFR No 96) and one of the objectives of this project is to interact different teams dealing with th...

The hypothalamus participates in the control of energy homeostasis by detecting circulating nutrients, such as glucose. The mediobasal hypothalamus (MBH), in particular, senses hyperglycemia and initiates physiological responses, e.g., insulin secretion via the autonomous (vagal) nervous system. We...

The severity of the sequelae of traumatic brain injury (TBI) depends on the extent of primary damage as well as the implication of secondary injury cascades that are triggered within the hours and days post- insult. Neuroinflammation is an important post-TBI cascade whose inhibition has been describ...

Cystic fibrosis is a pulmonary pathology, caused by the CFTR channel dysfunction, and characterized by high mucus viscosity, increased sensitivity to chronic infections and excessive inflammation. The aim of my thesis was first to study the inflammatory mechanisms involved in this lung pathology. In...

The clinical care of muscle fatigue with exercise therapies aim at quality of life improvement and usually involve unilateral exercises or neuromuscular electrical stimulation to compensate impaired muscle function in both healthy and health-compromised people. Muscle fatigue is a decline in maximal...

The environment of very preterm infant (VPI) greatly differs from intrauterine environment and contributes to his risk of altered neurodevelopment. Little is known about the visual sensitivity of VPI. It is evaluated through their physiological and behavioural responsiveness and cortical haemodynami...

Recent research on microglia has uncovered a multitude of activities that extends the role of these cells well beyond their traditional function as immune sentinels. The most prominent of these newly described activities is an intricate role in neuronal network remodeling notably upon environmental...

1.1 AbstractThe treatment of memory disorders and cognitive deficits in various forms of mental retardation may greatly benefit from a better understanding of the molecular and cellular mechanisms of memory formation. Different forms of memory have distinct molecular requirements.Short-term memory (...

peer reviewed Lexicality and phonotactic frequency effects are observed in many cognitive studies on language processing, but little is known about their underlying neural substrates, especially with regard to phonotactic frequency effects. Here, we conducted a positron emission tomography (PET) stu...

My study on the functional role of the central serotoninergic receptor2B (5-HT2BR) is a logical continuation of the work already carried out in the laboratory. Recent results obtained in the laboratory have shown that 5-HT2BRs differentially modulate ascending dopaminergic (DA) pathways. Indeed, 5-H...

Stroke results from insufficient blood supply to the brain and is the third leading cause of death in the world. Experimentally and clinically, stroke is followed by acute and prolonged inflammatory responses, and about a third of stroke survivors suffer from post-stroke dementia. Although numerous...

Audiovisual interactions taking place during the perception of audiovisual events were explored in two mainly auditory phenomena: speech perception and representation in auditory sensory memory (ASM), by means of behavioural and electrophysiological measures.<br />Concerning speech perception, we ha...

Basal ganglia (BG) are a set of brain nuclei that control crucial aspects of everyday life such as motor control, habit learning and reward. In particular, the striatum is the biggest nucleus and input station of BG. It is formed by two subsets of projection neurons (SPN) that modulate BG output act...

The development of new drugs and the validation and standardization of neuroimaging and biological markers for Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) clinical treatment trials is expected to be one of the major goals of AD research in the upcoming years. The present thesis aims to adress these critical issues. Th...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disorder inducing cognitive dysfunction, in particular memory loss. The use of murine models of AD have highlighted alterations of the neural activity of hippocampal and cortical networks leading to alteration of brain oscillations and spontaneous epil...

Theta rhythm is a prominent oscillatory pattern of EEG strongly associated with active locomotion and REM sleep. While it has been shown to play a crucial role in communication between brain areas and memory processes, there is a lack of extensive data due to the difficulty to image global brain act...

International audience Enhanced memory for emotional faces is a significant component of adaptive social interactions, but little is known on its neural developmental correlates. We explored the role of amygdaloid complex (AC) and medial temporal lobe (MTL) in emotional memory recognition across dev...

L’apparition soudaine d’un objet dans le champ visuel périphérique déclenche un mouvement d’orientation saccadique des yeux vers l’endroit où se trouve l’objet ciblé. Celui-ci se retrouve alors dans le champ visuel central (fovéal), augmentant de fait la masse de cellules nerveuses excitées parla pr...

The understanding and the prediction of the clinical outcomes of focal or degenerative cerebral lesions, as well as the assessment of rehabilitation procedures, necessitate knowing the cerebral substratum of cognitive or sensorimotor functions. This is achieved by activation studies, where subjects...

Vanishing white matter disease (VWMD) or childhood ataxia with central nervous system hypomyelination (CACH) is an autosomal recessive demyelinating disorder with wide phenotypic heterogeneity caused by autosomal recessive mutations in the genes encoding the five subunits of the translation-initiati...