The Neurocom project is a research program funded by the European NEST-PATHFINDER program entitled « What it means to be human ».

It focuses on the neural bases of language and communication, two eminently human abilities with roots in both early child development and the evolutionary origins of our species. Experts from a wide range of fields have joined forces: linguists, psychologists, ethologists, neuroscientists, and cognitive scientists. Their aim is to distinguish, within human communication channels, major human-specific components and the neural circuitry that supports them in the cortex of the human brain.

To tackle the developmental and evolutionary aspects of human language and communication, the Neurocom consortium compares human adults with babies, and humans with non-human primates (macaques). Teams pursue the following specific objectives: to map the neural substrates of three communication channels (speech, calls, and gestures); to find the neural substrate of speaker invariance; to study understanding of intention in humans and babies, and investigate monkeys’ interpretation of actions; to study communicative referential cues (gaze shift and pointing), their substrate, and their role in learning new words; to investigate the neural processing of hierarchical structures in syntax and the neural substrate involved in learning an artificial grammar.

The work combines behavioural testing with neuro-imaging. Many experiments involve mapping and monitoring brain regions that become activated and - possibly - show adaptation in subjects placed in a learning context (with or without communicative referential cues) or exposed to speech, calls, gestures, or videotaped action sequences. The neuro-imaging techniques used for this approach include functional magnetic imaging (fMRI, performed on all categories of subjects), near-infrared spectroscopy (on babies), and single-neuron recording (on monkeys).

Neurocom will yield an informed view of which major components of language are truly unique to humans. It will generate new knowledge on the functional architecture of the human cortex, and in some cases it will highlight the relationships between the human cortex and that of the macaque, making it possible to integrate into human studies the knowledge available about cortical function in this non-human primate.