Biosketch

Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz is a pediatrician and cognitive scientist known for her work on cognitive development, particularly in infants. She received her medical degree from the University of François Rabelais (Tours, France) and her doctorate in medicine with a specialization in pediatrics from the University of Angers (France). After a PhD in cognitive sciences, she obtained a full-time research position at CNRS (Centre national de la recherche scientifique, France) in 1999. She has done pioneering work using brain imaging in infants and currently directs the developmental neuroimaging laboratory at Neurospin, INSERM, CEA, Université Paris-Saclay. She participates in numerous television and radio programs to explain cognitive development to the general public.

Research Interests

Ghislaine Dehaene-Lambertz's laboratory uses non-invasive brain imaging techniques to investigate the development of cognitive functions in children. The goal is to understand how complex cognitive functions emerge in the human brain by determining the primitive functions accessible to an infant brain to process the external word early in life, and how these initial biases in brain organization are shaped by a human environment and culture, notably family and school. Her main domain of research is language acquisition, but she has also worked on other high level cognitive functions such as music, number, face perception and the neural bases of consciousness in infants.

Membership Type

International Member

Election Year

2022

Primary Section

Section 52: Psychological and Cognitive Sciences