A New Research Adventure Begins

On December 4-6, a cross-disciplinary workshop called ‘Cognitive Control, Communication and Perception: Psychological and Neurobiological Aspects’ will be held at Higher School of Economics in Moscow. The workshop is planned as an inaugural event for the recently launched Centre for Cognition & Decision Making at the HSE Faculty of Psychology. The centre incorporates a number of individual research groups, leaded by Vasily Klucharev,  Yury Shtyrov, Vadim Nikulin, Boris Gutkin, and Alexei Ossadtchi, whose studies cover a broad range of topics, including attention and decision-making, emotions, communication, action and perception (e.g., language comprehension and production), neurodynamics, neuroimaging and computational modelling of neurocognitive processes.

The centre is committed to establishing and maintaining a strong international research programme. Dr Pascal Belin, Professor at the Faculty of Medicine at Aix-Marseille University, Director of the European Center for Research in Medical Imaging, one of the key participants at the event, kindly agreed to speak with the HSE news service and shed some light on his research.

— The meeting in Moscow is an inaugural event for the newly organized Centre for Cognition & Decision Making at the HSE Faculty of Psychology. How do you see your participation in this kind of international research body?

— I’m looking forward to participating in this inaugural event, and I’m really happy to be there and begin a new adventure. I hope that during the three-day inauguration, I will meet some colleagues who share some specific interests with me, and then we will perhaps be able to collaborate. I would like to develop my own research interests and hopefully ensure that the Russian public and researchers know more about my work. In another direction, I would also be delighted to know more about the specific research done at this centre, and about how possible long-term collaboration might be envisaged.  That would be rather interesting.

— Could you please tell us a little about your report 'A Vocal Brain: Cerebral Processing of Voice Information'? What are the highlights and main findings of your research? 

— As for the highlights, I will present on the way our brain analyzes the sounds of the human voice. Not just speech but also all paralinguistic cues. There is varied research on it. For example, there is an interesting finding, a discovery that every single person, you, me – all of us – have areas of the brain dedicated to the voice. The human voice is an important signal; it plays such an important role in our social interactions that we have brain modules dedicated to specifically analyzing the voice.

— What makes our voice so important?

— It is really important because it contains lots of different sources of information, of course speech but also information on the body of a person, information on the emotional state, information on a person’s identity. During the millions of years of evolution, we elaborated on the abilities that we share with other animals. Speech is special, speech is unique for humans, but recognizing individuals by the voice, recognizing the emotions – these are the things that we share with many other animals that have a long evolutionary history. We are really good at that. And these abilities play a really important role. For example, when you hear somebody speaking, you might detect irony; that’s when what is being said is not exactly the same as the way you say it.