Antoni Rodriguez-Fornells est résident FIAS/Iméra pour l'année académique 2024-25. Son projet à l'Iméra, l'Institut d'Études Avancées de l'Université d'Aix-Marseille, vise à fournir, pour la première fois, des preuves comportementales et neurales du rôle significatif des mécanismes liés à la récompense dans le maintien de la motivation intrinsèque observée chez les nourrissons lors de l'acquisition du langage. Les nourrissons sont des apprenants actifs et curieux, agissant comme de petits scientifiques qui explorent sélectivement, recueillent des informations et apprécient ce processus. Ces observations soulignent la composante intrinsèquement gratifiante de l'apprentissage du langage et l'interaction essentielle entre les systèmes émotionnels et motivationnels et les mécanismes d'apprentissage du langage aux premières étapes de cette acquisition. Le but de ce projet est de fournir de nouvelles preuves chez les nourrissons concernant le rôle important de la motivation intrinsèque (traitement de la récompense) et de l'auto-surveillance durant les premières étapes de l'acquisition du langage.
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0:00 You I'm Antonio Rodriguez Forneis. I'm a research professor at the Catalan Institute of Research and Advanced Studies in Barcelona. And I work in the Condition and Brain Plasticity Unit, which is an interdisciplinary unit in which we try to understand learning mechanisms and brain plasticity, especially in healthy populations and also in brain patients. Because of our presence in the medical campus, we have been always very multidisciplinary and we have been doing a lot of research at transitional level, trying to apply knowledge
0:36 that we have been gathering in neuroscience into new interventions that could be helpful for patients, for example, in developing music interventions or new ways to rehabilitate language in aphasic patients. From the beginning, I was really interested in understanding the brain and the brain dynamics underlying cognition. I've become a specialised on analysing neurophysiological data, especially data that we can acquire in humans when they are doing different tasks, for example, using eliconecephalography or functional MRI.
1:02 I want to emphasize that I've been always very explorative, so very driven by curiosity and trying to understand how the brain sustains cognitive processes. And if I go back to my research career, I really think that my most rewarding moments or my flow moments, if you want. has been always when I was able to listen somehow, metaphorically, what the brain is trying to tell us how cognition is sustained. So what we can understand from the measures we are basically recruiting. My research project at Imera is trying to understand to which extent the drive we see in
1:34 infants to acquire a language in some somehow is sustained by reward and pleasure mechanisms in the brain. So one of the things that we always see is that infants are really curious. They are really eager to engage in information seeking. They are playing, they are really enjoying the activity of learning. So that basically demonstrates that there has to be a link between this learning mechanism and the capacity to enjoy that. So this drive for learning language was somehow associated to emotional mechanisms that reinforce these activities.
2:04 And basically that's the aim of my project here. I think two ideas are in the background of this project. The first one is that I've always been very surprised to see the huge individual difference that exists in language learning. For example, there are people that are really good. They engage in learning many languages during their life. Even they become addict to learn. But you also see the other way around. So there are people that never manage to learn a new language, even if they really need that because they come to another country.
2:30 So I become thinking to which extent this, this is maybe not associated to the aptitude or capacity. It is interesting. It is interesting. but to the emotional aspects or motivational mechanisms that basically amplify this learning or block this learning. And the second idea is built on the neuroscience of music. So from neuroscience of music during the last year we have been seeing how in order to decode music into pleasure. It wasn't interesting. It wasn't interesting. we use centers in the brain that are associated to reward emotions and motivation.
2:55 So the idea would be very similar in language, to which extent the evolution of language might have been interlinked or bind, if you want, these mechanisms that provide emotions or enjoyment or electronic components that could be reinforcing also this drive to learn language because it's so important for communication in humans. I think I'm going to be very lucky because joining the community here at Imera and the AMU will be an excellent opportunity for me to learn of cognitive neuroscience researchers in different laboratories.
3:24 And I particularly going to be collaborating with many people from the Parola Language Labs, also with several researchers from ELCB. So I expect that this would be an excellent opportunity for me to grow and to interchange ideas.
