Laurent Cohen

Congenital aphantasia reveals frontotemporal and cingulate structural alterations underlying conscious access to imagery

This study identifies structural brain differences in frontotemporal and cingulate regions in individuals with congenital aphantasia, suggesting altered higher-order systems may underlie the absence of conscious imagery.

Early sensory deprivation drives local reorganization of sensory integration within a conserved global hierarchy

This study shows early sensory deprivation causes localized reorganization near deprived primary sensory areas while preserving the overall cortical hierarchy.

Category-preferring patches in human orbitofrontal cortex

The paper identifies category-preferring patches in the human orbitofrontal cortex using fMRI, showing similar organization and function to the ventral occipitotemporal cortex.

Visual mental imagery in typical imagers and in aphantasia: A millimeter-scale 7-T fMRI study

This study uses 7T fMRI to compare neural activity during visual mental imagery and perception in typical imagers and aphantasic individuals, revealing differences in brain connectivity.

Seeing speech: neural mechanisms of cued speech perception in prelingually deaf and hearing users

This study investigates brain regions involved in cued speech perception in deaf and hearing users, identifying differences in neural activation patterns between experts and novices.

Numerical discrimination in Drosophila melanogaster

This study shows Drosophila fruit flies spontaneously prefer larger numerical quantities and identifies a neuronal substrate for numerical cognition.

Does the visual word form area split in bilingual readers? A millimeter-scale 7T fMRI study

This study uses 7T fMRI to investigate whether bilingual readers have distinct cortical patches for different languages, finding overlapping but specialized regions for English-French and additional patches for English-Chinese.

Seeing speech: The cerebral substrate of tickertape synesthesia.

The paper studies ticker-tape synesthesia (TTS) using fMRI to show that it involves top-down processing of speech into visualized letters, similar to reading, and identifies brain regions involved in this process.

Simulating the emergence of the Visual Word Form Area: Recycling a convolutional neural network for reading

The paper simulates the emergence of the visual word form area by training a convolutional neural network to recognize written words, showing it can replicate key properties of the VWFA.

Color naming and categorization depend on distinct functional brain networks

This study identifies distinct brain networks associated with color naming and categorization using fMRI and behavioral data.

Semantic coding in the occipital cortex of early blind individuals

This study investigates whether the visual cortex of early blind individuals codes for word meaning by comparing neuronal activity during a semantic decision task using MEG between blind and sighted participants.

Distinctive interaction between cognitive networks and the visual cortex in early blind individuals

The paper shows that early blind individuals have visual cortex activation during cognitive tasks, which integrates into specific brain networks with distinct functional roles.