Michèle FABRE-THORPE
Directeur de Recherche CNRS
Tél : (+33)(0)5-62-17-28-07
Fax : (+33)(0)5-62-17-28-09

POSITION 2000-2005

2005 - ... : Head of CerCo (Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition).
2003 - … : Member of the board of directors of the "Federative institute of brain Research" in Toulouse.
2005 - ... : Member of the University Toulouse 3 "Neurosciences committee of scientific experts"
2003 - 2005 : Acting Head of CerCo.
2000 - 2004 : Member and Scientific administrator of the CNRS National Scientific Research Committee : Mental functions, Integrative Neurosciences, Behaviour.

RESEARCH INTERESTS

I have always been interested in the way visual information is processed to control behaviour. I started working on the cerebral circuits involved in the learning and the control of visually guided reaching towards moving targets in cats. Since 1993 when I moved to Toulouse, I mainly focused on the fast visual processing of natural scenes in monkeys, humans and patients. Monkeys and Humans can be very fast at deciding whether a natural photograph flashed for only 20 ms contains an animal or not. This ability is linked with a differential brain activity between targets and distracters trials that develop from 150 ms after stimulus onset.
The fast motor responses observed in such tasks could rely on an coarse, unconscious object representation. In recent years we have accumulated evidence showing that such rapid visual processing should be massively parallel, essentially feed-forward and based on the first available visual information. But this coarse object representation built from early visual information might not be sufficient for all object categories. It has proved to allow the categorization of animals, human faces or means of transport, but additionnal processing time is needed for categorization at the basic level such as dogs or birds

DEMONSTRATION


TECHNIQUES
Comparative approach (Monkeys/Humans)
Combined behavioral and EEG approach.
fMRI
Neuropsychology (agnosia, prosopagnosia, heminegligence, Stargardt…)


TEACHING
DEA (Research Master)
Animal Cognition
Attentive and preattentive vision


RESEARCH TEAM
Denis Fize : CR1 CNRS
Arnaud Delorme : CR2 CNRS
Ghislaine Richard (University lecturer)
Florence Rémy (University lecturer)
Marc Macé (PhD student)
Olivier Joubert (PhD student)		 PREVIOUS STUDENTS
Anne Viévard
Fabienne Levesque
Richard Carayan
Erika Lorincz
Arnaud Delorme
Anne Aubertin
Guillaume Rousselet

KEYWORDS
Natural scenes, Fast visual processing, dynamic of visual processing, Comparative approach (Humans and monkeys), EEG, Object recognition, Object categorization


SOME SELECTED RECENT PUBLICATIONS

 Fabre-Thorpe M., Richard G. & Thorpe S. J. (1998). Rapid categorization of natural images by rhesus monkeys. Neuroreport, 9, 2, 303-308.
Delorme A., Richard G. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2000). Ultra-rapid categorisation of natural images does not rely on colour: A study in monkeys and humans. Vision Research,40, 2187-2200
Fize D., Boulanouar K., Chatel Y., Ranjeva J-P, Fabre-Thorpe M. & Thorpe S.J. (2000). Brain structures involved in rapid categorization of natural scenes : an event-related fMRI study. Neuroimage, 11, 634-643.
Fabre-Thorpe M., Delorme A., Marlot C. & Thorpe S.J. (2001). A limit to the speed of processing in Ultra-Rapid Visual categorisation of novel natural scenes. J Cognitive Neurosci, 13, 171-180.
Thorpe S.J. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2001). Seeking categories in the brain. Perspectives. Science, 291, 260-263.
Thorpe S.J., Gegenfurtner K., Fabre-Thorpe M. & Bülthoff H.H. (2001). Detection of animals in natural images using far peripheral vision. European Journal of Neuroscience, 14, 869-876.
Rousselet G., Fabre-Thorpe M. & Thorpe S.J. (2002). Parallel processing in high level categorization of natural images Nature Neuroscience, 5, 629-630.
Fabre-Thorpe M. (2003). Visual Categorization : Accessing abstraction in non human primates Philosophical Transactions by the Royal Society B, 358, 1215-1223.
Rousselet G. A., Thorpe, S. J. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2003). Taking the MAX from neuronal responses. TICS, 7, 99-102.
Rousselet G. A. Macé M. J-M. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2003). Is it an animal? Is it a human face? Fast processing in upright and inverted natural scenes. Journal of Vision, 3 (6), 440-456.
Rousselet G. A., Macé M. J-M. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2004). Animals and Humans faces in natural scenes: How specific to human faces is the N170 ERP component? Journal of Vision, 4, 13-21.
Delorme A., Rousselet G. A. Macé M. J-M. & Fabre-Thorpe M. ( 2004). Interaction of top-down and bottom-up processing in the fast visual analysis of natural scenes. Cognitive Brain Res,19(2), 103-113.
Rousselet G. A., Thorpe S.J. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2004). Processing of one, two or four natural scenes in humans: the limits of parallelism. Vision Research, 44 (9), 877-894
Rousselet G. A., Thorpe S. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2004). How parallel is visual processing in the ventral pathway? TICS (review), 8, 363-370.
Macé M. J-M., Richard, G., Delorme, A. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2005) Rapid categorization of natural scenes in monkeys: Target predictability and processing speed Neuroreport. 16(4), 349-354.
Bacon-Macé N., Macé M. J-M., Fabre-Thorpe M. & Thorpe S.J. (2005) The time course of visual processing : Backward masking and natural scene categorization. Vision Research, 45, 1459-1469.
Macé M. J-M., Thorpe S.J. & Fabre-Thorpe M. (2005) Rapid categorization of achromatic natural scenes : how robust at very low contrasts? Eur J Neurosci., 21, 2007-2018.

POSTAL ADDRESS
Centre de Recherche Cerveau et Cognition
UMR 5549 (CNRS- Université Paul Sabatier)
Faculté de Médecine de Rangueil-Bât A3
31 062 TOULOUSE Cedex 9
FRANCE