Postdoctoral researcher in behavioural ecology. PhD in cognitive neuroscience. I'm also learning to engage in and promote a better science: open, inclusive, accessible; slow.

Research projects

Internship proposals / Offres de stage

  • Master level (5-6 months, funded): Deep learning x sexual signal design - [see offer]
  • Licence, Master 1 ou césure (3-8 semaines, non financé): Codage de vidéos comportementales de poissons - [voir l’annonce]

Project 1: Mate preference and natural statistics in darters 🐟

We are designing and conducting several behavioural experiments to understand how natural statistics influence mate preferences in the Darter fish (Etheostoma). We rely on artificial neural networks to create novel visual stimuli that mimic natural statistics and investigate their relationship with preferences.
The main idea relies on the principle that more frequent stimuli are easier (faster, more efficient) to process because the visual system has adapted to them. Could this ‘ease’ of processing some visual properties influence preference towards those properties? We use mate preference as a proxy to test this idea. For example, a potential mate whose appearance reflects to some extent the visual properties of their environment might be preferred over another mate that wouldn’t or would less. This has interesting evolutionary implications in terms of mechanisms that could explain mate choice and/or mate preference.
We have just released a preprint on the use of artificial intelligence to study animal signals based on those experiments. You can read it [here]! Our next step is to conduct the same tests but in largemouth bass, a predator of darters. This will inform us on the role that natural selection might play on those pattern preferences.

Project 2: Strength of preference for conspecifics in darters 📈

We conducted a meta-analysis of all the past Mendelson Lab’s studies that investigated the strength of preference for conspecifics over heterospecifics in darters. We wanted to have a better idea of the effect sizes and factors that might influence mate preference across species.
Along with an effect size of medium strength, we found that both geographic relationships and genetic distance influence the strength of preference. We presented this work at the 2022 annual meeting of the Animal Behavior Society. You can have a look at our [poster] or our [preprint] for more details.

Project 3: Attractiveness of visual patterns in humans 💻

We have an ongoing online experiment. Give it a try!
It takes no more than 15 minutes and it’s fun to do!
➡️ Link to the experiment: http://isemsurvey.mbb.univ-montp2.fr/pattern/
You can also share the link around you!

Former projects and projects in the background

Understanding how the primate brain processes tridimensional visual information that is extracted from binocular disparities 🧠

Binocular disparities are the small differences between the eye’s projections of a visual scene that underlie binocular depth perception

We conducted a functional neuroimaging (fMRI) study in macaques 🐒 to identify brain areas that would respond more strongly to natural motion-in-depth compared to scrambled motion. We found a set of areas that we described in this [paper]. This highlighted the need to do more research involving 3D motion, as most studies on motion are done with planar or 2D motion, which limits our understanding of visual processing.

In another fMRI study, we asked whether some brain areas would be more strongly activated when the subject perceives a stimulus that is made of visual properties that are more frequent in natural scenes. We showed surfaces that were either slanted or tilted in depth and compared brain responses to those different configurations. Our macaque subjects showed different responses, making the results difficult to interprete. We wondered whether the angle of the surface inclination we used should be more personalised to reflect individual differences. This requires testing the visual threshold of depth perception of our subjects using a psychophysics paradigm. Spoiler: This is a very long procedure and we are still collecting the data! In the meanwhile, we could already compare the data we obtained from one macaque subject to our human participants and, great news, they are similar! Check the poster we presented at the Predictive Brain Conference to know more: [Poster].

Technical developments: Refinement of the estimation of the hemodynamic response function for several macaque subjects. Development of a pipeline to increase the signal-to-noise ratio of fMRI images using a principal component analysis (PCA) approach.