L'Oréal

About L'Oréal

Unité Neuroscience, Information et Complexité (UNIC) is a « Unité Propre de Recherche » of the Centre National de la Recherche ScientifiqueThe research led at UNIC (Dir. Yves Frégnac) is interdisciplinary, at the interface between Physics and Biology. It uses concepts from statistical physics, dynamic systems and applied mathematics to 1) guide experimental exploration of sensory processing and its plasticity, in thalamic and cortical networks2) identify the synaptic and neuronal mechanisms of low-level perception. The scientific aim is to characterize the complexity of biological systems by making inferences across nested levels of integration, along bottom-up or top-down axes.The different research teams at UNIC focus on three closely linked scientific issues: - characterizing the synaptic and cellular mechanisms engaged in the ongoing activation state and sensory evoked neural dynamics in cortical-like structures (during development and adulthood) - explaining/modeling the emergence of low-level perception correlates in primary sensory cortical areas- explaining/modeling the influence of lateral and top-down feedback connectivities. Several sensory modalities are studied in different brain structures and species. Research is based on interdisciplinary approaches, ranging from electrophysiological techniques, network functional imaging and psychophysical measurements to databases of correlates between structure and function, theoretical neuroscience and computational modeling, as well as statistical physics and large scale simulations.The work is at the interface between sensory electrophysiology, experimental psychology, cognitive sciences and brain Imaging for its experimental side, and neurogeometry, computational neurosciences, neuroinformatics and physics of complex dynamic systems for the theoretical side.