Hydrogen sulfide, which has only been known as an environmental pollutant for decades, has recently emerged as a gas of biological importance. It completes the triumvirate of gaseous mediators / transmitters, along with nitric oxide NO and carbon monoxide CO. However, if the biology of nitric oxide in now pretty well understood, the biology of hydrogen sulfide remains obscure, despite a number of seminal results reported the literature in the past few months. Among the tools used to accelerate our knowledge of the role played by nitric oxide and carbon monoxide in biology, coordination chemistry has been a major player, with metal nitrosyls or carbonyls as donors of NO or CO, and with the development of a fluorescent nitric oxide sensor based on a copper complex which is able to detect the production of nitric oxide in cells. However, the coordination chemistry of hydrogen sulfide remains essentially centered on organometallic chemistry, and its extension to biological problems is so far limited. For example, until our recently published work, no example of hydrogen sulfide-selective probe using this bioinorganic approach was reported, and no example of donor of hydrogen sulfide based on coordination chemistry is found in the literature, while the detection of H2S in biological tissues is one crucial key to our comprehension of its role in biology, and while it is necessary to develop new hydrogen sulfide releasing molecules to replace the only two efficient donors known to date, NaHS and Na2S, which are toxic. Moreover, there is no molecular answer to a number of speculations about the reactivity of hydrogen sulfide towards some reactive species present in-vivo and which could play a role in its regulation. This project proposes to fill this gap, by developing three axes: i) development of selective fluorescent sensors of hydrogen sulfide in solution, ii) development of slowly-releasing hydrogen sulfide in solution, and iii) studies aiming at elucidating the reactivity of H2S towards some species present in biology. These three axes are all centered on coordination chemistry, and the extension to studies with biological material is planned in the medium term.

The “FeelSpeech” project will provide proof of concept of a novel prosthesis that will allow people with hearing loss to better understand speech. The prosthesis will be worn on the wrist and will resemble a wristwatch. A special, novel kind of tactile stimulation called “microstroking” provided by the device will supplement what a person hears, and this information will be unconsciously made use of by the user’s brain, providing improved speech perception even when the user has almost lost all hearing.

Spelling in French raises recurring problems and several studies show that such difficulties, specifically misspellings, can pose a major handicap to career achievement. Studies on spelling difficulties and the way to overcome them remain rare, particularly in comparison to studies on reading, both in French and in other writing systems. While some studies on reading acquisition contribute to our knowledge of spelling development, studies specifically on spelling acquisition are indispensable. Despite the high correlation between performance on reading and spelling tasks, there are often children or adults who are good readers but poor spellers, whereas the reverse pattern is far more rare, and perhaps nonexistent (according to some researchers). This discrepancy between reading and spelling performance can be explained by differences in cognitive demands: a word can often be read based on partial cues, but each individual letter in a word has to be produced in spelling. In addition to this difference, which is found across all writing systems, there are two particular challenges in French: 1) the relationship between oral and written units is far more irregular in the conversion from oral to written language than from writing to speech; 2) silent letters are frequent. - The first aim of this project is to specify how different types of information are used in the course of spelling acquisition. The second aim is to determine empirically the impact of specific educational practices on spelling acquisition. - The first set of studies will specify how different types of information (phonological, orthographic, morphological) are used during spelling acquisition by elementary school children (grades 1 to 5). We will determine the aspects of the orthography that pose particular difficulties to children with various performance profiles: good in both reading and spelling; poor in both reading and spelling; good readers who are poor in spelling; good spellers who are poor readers (should this group exist). While studies to date have mainly focused on the role of phonology and word specific knowledge, we will extend beyond this scope to explore the impact of knowledge of orthographic and morphological regularities. We will consider specifically the integration of these two different sources of information, which, to date, have been studied independently. Corpus analyses will allow us to characterize the nature, origins and evolution of misspellings, as well as to describe their relationship with various performance profiles. Experimental studies will permit us to address questions to which corpus analyses cannot provide complete answers. The same children will be given both standardized and experimental tasks. These tasks will allow us to assess children's knowledge of orthographic regularities and their morphological knowledge. We will also analyze children's eye movement during reading in order to explore whether differences in the way children process words in the reading task are associated with differences in spelling performance. - A second series of studies will explore the impact of specific educational practices on spelling acquisition. In particular, we are interested in the role of mistakes in children's learning. This is an important question because many pedagogical approaches involve exposure to and/or production of errors (e.g., the choice between two spellings, one correct, and one incorrect, especially in educational software). We will aim to specify the conditions under which such experiences with errors are beneficial or, on the contrary, detrimental to the learning process. We will assess the efficacy of various modes of attentional processing in situations in which learners are exposed (or not) to specific types of errors (learning the spelling of a word through reading it vs. copying it vs. choosing between two spellings, one correct, the other incorrect). We will assess whether the impact of mistakes varies as a...

The aim of the project is to investigate preparatory attention (PA), an important component of attention, from childhood to old age, and explore its dysfunctions in various pathologies, known to alter executive function and attentional processing. PA is an aspect of prolonged attention (in opposition to brief attention), which is initiated before an expected event. It is typically based on the expectation that, for example, a particular object will occur in a particular location. However, it is more than a simple expectation (which can be coded in a verbal form) because it requires the activation of a mental image of the expected event. PA might have important consequences, in adapting behavior to a specific context or a complex situation. There will be three parts in this project, concerning the mechanisms, the life-span development and the deficits and dysfunctions of PA. Two main experimental paradigms will be used in this project, the attentional preparatory test, or APT (developed by Auclair, LaBerge & Siéroff, 2000) and an informative spatial cueing experiment using long delays between cue and target. In the APT, the competition between target and distracter for control of preparation varies with the probability that a distracter will occur. Several questions concerning the mechanisms of PA remain in debate. In this part of the project, we will specifically evaluate the mechanisms of PA with the APT, which has the advantage that little spatial selection is required, and results indicate a relatively pure measure of PA. Five aspects of the mechanisms of PA will be studied: - the time course of PA; - the dissociation between location-based and object-based PA; - the relationship between PA and working memory; - the relationship between PA and episodic memory; - the preparation to resist interference, relationship between PA and attentional capture. Preparation requires high cognitive control, and cognitive control is closely related to the maturation of prefrontal cortex. Prefrontal cortex is a late-developing region of the neocortex and is also the cortical region that undergoes the greatest expansion in the course of both evolution and individual maturation. However, there is little evidence of a specific link between changes in prefrontal function and development in PA in childhood. Our aim is to study the development of PA between the age of 5 and 12, using the APT and an informative spatial cueing experiment using long delays between cue and target. Similarly, there are very few studies on PA in the elderly, although more and more elderly keep performing cognitive tasks, which require an optimal PA (like driving). We will explore, with the APT, the evolution of PA in aging. Finally, previous research using the APT have shown that patients with fronto-temporal dementia with a predominance of frontal degeneration (Siéroff et al., 2004) and children suffering from frontal lobe epilepsy (Auclair et al., 2005) present deficits in PA. There are several goals in the neuropsychological part of the project. First, concerning studies conducted in patients suffering from focal lesions, we want to: (1) specify which hemisphere and which brain areas are more specifically involved in PA (prefrontal areas, premotor areas, parietal areas?); (2) dissociate disorders of location-based and object-based PA; (3) evaluate the evolution of PA, specifically after surgical resection of parts of the brain. Five studies will be conducted, on: - PA before and after surgical resection of brain low-grade glioma; - PA in head (frontal lobe) traumas, and side of the lesion; - PA and resisting to attentional capture: effect of thalamic and premotor lesions; - PA in childhood frontal lobe epilepsy; - PA and cognitive difficulties in children treated for cerebellar tumors. Second, we are interested to evaluate deficits of PA in those patients who suffer from diffuse lesions or in patients whose dysfunction is not well related to a specific lesion in the brain. Several patients, like patients suffering from Turner syndrome or children presenting hyperactivity, are considered as suffering from attentional problems. Because PA may represent one of the most 'fragile' form of attention, we assume that PA is particularly vulnerable to cerebral sufferance. The APT (initial an adapted version) will be used to explore PA in these patients. Preparatory attention is an important aspect of attention, with major consequences in daily life. Still, few studies have been conducted on normal and pathological preparatory attention. We believe that we cannot continue to ignore this crucial cognitive activity. This project is important because, first, a better understanding of normal preparatory attention with methods from experimental psychology is necessary, and, second, because the diagnostic and the rehabilitation of various groups of patients can benefit from such experimental studies.