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Section: Partnerships and Cooperations
Regional Initiatives
PsyPhINe: Cogito Ergo Es
Participant : Nicolas Rougier.
Project gathering researchers from: MSH Lorraine (USR3261), InterPsy (EA 4432), APEMAC, EPSaM (EA4360), Archives Henri-Poincaré (UMR7117), Loria (UMR7503) & Mnemosyne.
PsyPhiNe is a pluridisciplinary and exploratory project between philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists and computer scientists. The goal of the project is to explore cognition and behavior from different perspectives. The project aims to explore the idea of assignments of intelligence or intentionality, assuming that our intersubjectivity and our natural tendency to anthropomorphize play a central role: we project onto others parts of our own cognition. To test these hypotheses, we ran a series of experiments with human subject confronted to a motorized lamp that can or cannot interact with them while they're doing a specific task. Early results (analysis not yet finished) tend to show that people have a tendency to over-interpret any kind of behavior as intentional and meaningful. We also organized our second national conference in Nancy gathering speakers from philosophy, robotics, art and psychology and hired a new post-doc to work on the new experimental setup (http://poincare.univ-lorraine.fr/fr/manifestations/psyphine-2016)
Project of the Aquitaine Regional Council: Decision making, from motor primitives to action
Participants : Nicolas Rougier, Meropi Topalidou.
This project has ended with the PhD defense of Meropi Topalidou on October 10th, 2016. Using a computational model, we investigated the classic hypothesis of habits formation and expression in the basal ganglia and proposed a new hypothesis concerning the respective role for both the basal ganglia and the cortex. Inspired by previous theoretical and experimental works [47], we designed a computational model of the basal ganglia- thalamus-cortex system that uses segregated loops (motor, cognitive and associative) and makes the hypothesis that basal ganglia are only necessary for the acquisition of habits while the expression of such habits can be mediated through the cortex. This work leads to several publications including an important article in "Movement disorders" [7] explaining some counter-intuitive clinical observations. Furthermore, the early work during the first year of the PhD led N.Rougier to create the ReScience journal.
Collaboration with the Neurocentre Magendie on parameter optimization: Neurobees
Participant : André Garenne.
The development of computational models of neurons and networks typically involves tuning the numerical parameters to fit experimental results. Parameter tuning can sometimes be manually completed, it is more convenient to use automated optimization algorithms at least for two reasons: (i) to apply an homogeneous processing to all the calculation and parameter space exploration which alleviates operator influence and (ii) to avoid a tedious and uncertain result from human operators when the dimensionality increases. A multi-agent algorithm in line with ABC (Artificial Bee Colony) paradigm has been applied to new benchmark tests in order to ensure its robustness and better performances, especially when compared to evolutionary and swarm algorithms and this has recently been confirmed, thanks to the local Plafrim computation facilities.