Stanislas Dehaene
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Stanislas Dehaene (born 12 May 1965) is a professor at the Collège de France, author, and (since 1989) director of INSERM Unit 562, "Cognitive Neuroimaging. He has worked on a number of topics, including numerical cognition, the neural basis of reading and the neural correlates of consciousness. Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the James S. McDonnell Foundation Centennial Fellowship in 1999 for his work on the "Cognitive Neuroscience of Numeracy". In 2003, together with Denis Le Bihan, Dehaene was awarded the Louis D. Prize from the Institut de France. In 2014, together with Giacomo Rizzolatti and Trevor Robbins, he was awarded the brain prize.
Numerical cognition
Dehaene is best known for his work on numerical cognition, a discipline which he popularized and synthesized with the publication of his 1997 book, The Number Sense (La Bosse des maths) which won the Template:Interlanguage link multi for best French language general-audience scientific book. He began his studies of numerical cognition with Jacques Mehler, examining the cross-linguistic frequency of number words, whether numbers were understood in an analog or compositional manner, and the connection between numbers and space (the "SNARC effect"). With Changeux, he then developed a computational model of numerical abilities, which predicted log-gaussian tuning functions for number neurons, a finding which has now been elegantly confirmed with single-unit physiology
With long-time collaborator Laurent Cohen, a neurologist at the Pitié-Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, Dehaene also identified patients with lesions in different regions of the parietal lobe with impaired multiplication, but preserved subtraction (associated with lesions of the inferior parietal lobule) and others with impaired subtraction, but preserved multiplication (associated with lesions to the intraparietal sulcus). This double dissociation suggested that different neural substrates for overlearned, linguistically mediated calculations, like multiplication, are mediated by inferior parietal regions, while on-line computations, like subtraction are mediated by the intraparietal sulcus. Shortly thereafter, Dehaene began EEG studies of these capacities, showing that parietal and frontal regions were specifically involved in mathematical cognition, including the dissociation between subtraction and multiplication observed in his previous patient studies.
Together with Pierre Pica, and Elizabeth Spelke, Stanislas Dehaene has studied the numeracy and numeral expressions of the mundurucu (an indigenous tribe living in Para, Brazil).
