Alan Langus

Visual imagery—the ability to mentally “see” objects and events in the mind’s eye—is central to many cognitive abilities, including memory, creativity, problem-solving, and language. Yet when this capacity first emerges remains unknown, as infants and very young children cannot yet tell us about their experiences. This project will develop a new method to directly test whether young infants visualize the referents of words by measuring their brain activity and tracking their eye movements during a word-learning task. Evidence that hearing words reactivates visual representations would offer the first direct demonstration of visual imagery in the first year of life. The findings could transform our understanding of the origins of abstract thought. The project will take place at the Babylab de Lyon, Institut des Sciences Cognitives Marc Jeannerod, with Dr. Jean-Rémy Hochmann and Dr. Liuba Papeo.