- 2022-2023: Attaché temporaire d'enseignement et de recherche (ATER), Université Savoie Mont-Blanc (USMB)
EDUCATION
- 10/2019-01/2023: PhD in Neuropsychology/Cognitive Neuroscience : Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition (LPNC), Université Savoie Mont Blanc (USMB). Supervision : Pr. Pascal Hot (LPNC/USMB; 100%). Thesis : Functional specialisation of the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus: the representational approach. Ecole Doctorale l’Ingénierie pour la santé, la cognition, et l’environnement (EDISCE)
- 2017-2019: Master degree: Neuropsychology and Clinical Neuroscience
- Second year Institute of Behavioural and neural sciences (IBANS), University of St-Andrews, UK. Supervisors : Dr. Barbara Dritschel (IBANS) & Pr. Pascal Hot (LPNC). Thesis : Dissociated impairments for emotional and self-defining autobiographical memories in Alzheimer’s disease
- First year Université Grenoble-Alpes (UGA), Laboratoire de Psychologie et Neurocognition (LPNC). Supervisors : Pr. Monica Baciu, Drs. Emilie Cousin, Elise Roger (LPNC). Thesis : GEREC: A fMRI protocol to map language and memory brain networks
RESEARCH OVERVIEW
PhD thesis : Functional specialisation of the medial temporal lobe and hippocampus: the representational approach
PhD Supervisor : Pascal Hot (Pr.)
The traditional view in neuropsychology associates the medial temporal lobe (MTL) with memory, whereas more posterior regions are usually associated with visual perception. Further, the hippocampus would be responsible for the process of recollection, or the rich and contextualised retrieval of a memory. In contrast, familiarity, or the feeling that something (such as a face or a place) has been encountered before, without remembering the context in which it happened, would rely on the perirhinal cortex (PRC). In this view, the MTL would be functionally organised according to distinct mnemonic processes. In the last decade, however, there has been growing evidence questioning the traditional view, and supporting an alternative account, leading to the representational view of occipito-temporal areas (Bussey & Saksida, 2007). This view argues that high-level cognitive processes such as recollection and familiarity are too complex to be explicative of neurocognitive functioning, and must rather be considered as the phenomena to explain. The authors thus propose to break down such processes into representations and operations (Cowell, Sadil, and Barense, 2019). The operation involved in recollection is pattern-completion, or the reconstruction of a stimulus from a partial cue. The representation involved in recollection is complex and associative, and traditionally includes a spatial layout, or a scene. When breaking cognitive processes into operations and representations, two hypotheses appear : A representation- and an operation-based accounts. Experimental evidence tend to support the representational account, as it has been demonstrated through fMRI scanning that the engagement of the hippocampus in recollection depends on the representation processed rather than on the reconstructive nature of the retrieval (Ross et al, 2018). However, this demonstration only concerns pattern-completion, while other operations still need to be investigated. My PhD aims at
Replicating the results from Ross and colleagues (not replicated so far).
Extending these results to other operations such as familiarity-based recognition, and visual discrimination.
Exploring how left and right MTL regions differentially contribute to complex visual perception tasks by investigating patients with unilateral MTL lesions.
