Short Bio & Links

Jean Lorenceau, born in 1954 in Paris, France, is a research director at the CNRS (DR1) that he joined in 1986 after a PhD in psychology and neuroscience (University P&M Curie).  He first worked at the “Laboratoire de Psychologie Experimentale”  (Centre Henri Piéron, 1986-1998), before moving to the “Laboratoire de Psychologie de la Perception et de l’Action” led by Prof. Alain Berthoz (Collège de France, 1998-2001) where he developed research on visual contour and motion integration, using experimental psychology and modelling. To study the neurophysiological bases of these processes, he then moved to a new research unit, the UNIC, led by Yves Frégnac (Gif-sur-Yvette, 2001-2004), where he assessed the dynamics of contour integration using both human psychophysics and electrophysiology in anesthetized cat. To understand the neuronal bases of these perceptual processes in humans, he joined the LENA led by Bernard Renault (Pitié-Salpétrière, 2004-2009), and then the ICM (“Insitut du Cerveau et de la Moelle Epinière”, 2010-2014, Dir. Bernard Zalc), where he used imaging methods (fMRI and MEG) to uncover the circuits and dynamics of visual perception. During this period, he developed clinical studies with Dr. Cédric Lamirel (Fondation A. de Rothschild) using eye-movement with Glacoma patients.  He also studied pupil dynamics and eye-movements, discovering a process by which individuals can write with the eyes using pursuit eye-movements (Lorenceau, 2012). In 2014, he joined the Departement d’Etude Cognitive (DEC) founded by Daniel Andler within the Ecole Normale Supérieure, and, with Pascal Mamassian, created a new laboratory (Laboratoire de Psychology de la Perception).  During this period, he developed a research program to evaluate whether ALS patients could use his Eye-Writing device to communicate, finding that indeed, as control subjects, some of these patients could learn to voluntarily master pursuit eye-movements to write letter, digits or small words. Willing to develop further clinical applications using his findings on pupil and eye-movements, he joined the “Institut de la Vision” (Dir. José Alain Sahel) in 2017, and launched a novel research program aiming at evaluating new behavioral methods to assess whether eye-movements and pupil activity correlate with, and reveal, ocular pathologies. He also initiated an epidemiologic research program, “CobEye” to characterize eye-movements in a large cohort (Constances, INSERM), for which he created a consortium of 10 research French teams.

In parallel with his research activity, Jean Lorenceau devoted a significant amount of time to favor the structuring of the scientific community working in Cognitive Science. He led a CNRS unit (1997-2017, the RISC (“Relais d’information sur les Science de la Cognition”) to help organizing the interdisciplinary field of Cognitive Science. With this unit, he created data bases to daily send information on scientific events to the community of researchers, developed a variety of tools to facilitate research (e.g. Data base of volunteers). Director of a network of researchers (Rescif, 2000-2008) he organized numerous scientific events. In 2008, he led a national prospective workshop on Cognitive Technologies (Pirstec, 2008-2010), and then founded the “Fondation Cognition”. With this foundation, he fostered the creation of the “Institut Carnot Cognition”, aiming at developing interactions and collaborations between researchers and industrial companies (2016-present), and is now the scientific advisor of this structure.

Since 1981, Jean Lorenceau teach in a variety of universities, organized several summer schools and occupied different positions in the master of Cognitive Science (Cogmaster).