About our lab

The Face Categorization Lab is located at CNRS and Université de Lorraine (IMoPA UMR 7365), within a Cognitive and Systems Neuroscience research group located in the Central University Hospital (CHRU) in Nancy.

The goal of our research is to understand how the human brain recognizes people by their face.

Recognition is considered as a Categorization function, i.e. how different responses are provided to different signals of the environment (Discrimination) and how similar responses are provided to different signals (Generalization). In the human species, this Categorization/Recognition function is extremely rich and diverse for facial signals (e.g., recognizing various visual inputs as faces, male faces, angry faces, a specific individual person, ...).

We tackle this difficult problem by using a variety of approaches: recording of behavioral measures, human electrophysiology (ERPs, EEG), neuroimaging (PET initially, fMRI), recordings of eye movements with gaze-contingency, single-case studies of brain-damaged patients (prosopagnosia), behavioral and EEG studies of infants and children, and human intracerebral recordings and electrical stimulations.

Have a look at our research projects