Congratulations to Étienne Koechlin, Director of the Cognitive and Computational Neuroscience Laboratory of the ENS and Director of Research at the INSERM

He 2019 Lamonica Prize in Neurology rewards Etienne Koechlin’s research work on the functions of the frontal lobe in decision-making, reasoning and judgment that underlie human thought and behavior, including in complex situations.
“When I started my research in the 1990s, it was an area still very little known, a somewhat mysterious terra incognita. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, I therefore started with my collaborators to explore this region, to study how its anatomical architecture translates into a functional and cognitive architecture which bases our judgments and decisions and ultimately our behaviors. “He explains.

With his team, he was able to make this transition from anatomy to functions and behaviors by developing mathematical models and above all “by seeking to ask the right questions!” It was a truly pioneering and daring work and therefore risky. ”
20 years later, Etienne Koechlin and his colleagues have made considerable progress by proposing a very complete anatomical, computational and cognitive mapping of the human frontal lobe. Widely recognized by the scientific community, they guide a large part of current research in this field, both at the fundamental and applied levels, from the clinic to artificial intelligence. The faculty of judgment and decision associated with the frontal lobe is indeed particularly impaired in most neuropsychiatric diseases and artificial intelligence still has great difficulty in reproducing it.
“When I started my research in the 1990s, it was an area still very little known, a somewhat mysterious terra incognita. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, I therefore started with my collaborators to explore this region, to study how its anatomical architecture translates into a functional and cognitive architecture which bases our judgments and decisions and ultimately our behaviors. “He explains.

Source : ENS.