Ourania Semelidou, postdoctoral researcher at Neurocentre Magendie, was awarded the 2024 NARSAD Young Investigator Grant from the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation (BBRF). Continuing the work she started on tactile perception as an FRM postdoctoral fellow, in the next two years Ourania will be conducting her research in the team “Cortical Plasticity”, co-mentored for this project by Andreas Frick and Anna Beyeler. Ourania’s project, titled “Attentional Control of Social Touch in Social Anxiety Disorder”, aims to broaden our understanding of social touch processing and attentional control in social anxiety disorder.
Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is a chronic psychiatric disorder, characterized by excessive and persistent fear of possible negative evaluation by others during social interactions, which often leads to social avoidance and withdrawal. Touch is a very important form of social interaction, reported altered in social anxious individuals who do not seem to profit from its advantages. However, even though a dislike for social touch has been reported by socially anxious individuals, neural responses to touch and the attentional processes necessary to filter this information when it becomes irrelevant have not been studied. Ourania’s project aims to characterize social and non-social tactile perception and its attentional control in social anxiety disorder, at the behavioral and neuronal level. To this end, Ourania will employ a mouse model of SAD and combine a novel tactile decision-making task with 2-photon microscopy in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC). This is the first study to characterize the neural correlates of social touch alterations in SAD, using a translational task that can be modified and employed in human studies for objective measurements of tactile responses in socially anxious individuals.
Building on her previous work, the BBRF Young Investigator Grant will enable Ourania to further advance her research and support her transition toward an independent research career.

Pièces jointes

Listen to the interview here: https://radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/la-science-cqfd/troubles-anxieux-7975840

Anxiety disorders are becoming more widely discussed, but anxiety is still a taboo subject. How does anxiety affect our lives and our bodies? What treatment options are available and what is our understanding of the physiology of anxiety?
With
Florian Ferreri Professor of Psychiatry at Sorbonne University, APHP Hôpital Saint-Antoine
Anna Beyeler Inserm research fellow, head of the ‘Neuronal circuits of anxiety’ team at the Magendie Neurocentre in Bordeaux.
Anxiety disorders are among the most widespread mental disorders in the world, but they are still somewhat taboo and are therefore not systematically diagnosed. Science, CQFD sheds light on the subject today.
While anxiety, like stress or fear, is one of the healthy reactions that enable us to protect ourselves from certain dangers and have even enabled us to survive as a species, anxiety disorders are pathological. With more than 20% of the population suffering from them at some point in their lives, anxiety disorders, which can be very debilitating for sufferers on a day-to-day basis, seem to be on the increase. What are the causes, what model of care is being proposed and what are the challenges of research into these disorders? These are the questions we will attempt to answer.

Further information: Anna Beyeler : Understanding the pathways of anxiety to tame it better (Fondation BS)

Meeting room: Centre Broca

Alexander Mathis
EPFL, Lausanne
https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=Y1xCzE0AAAAJ

Invited by Anna Beyeler (Magendie)

Title
Modeling sensorimotor circuits with machine learning: hypotheses, inductive biases, latent noise and curricula

Abstract
Hierarchical sensorimotor processing, modularity and experience are all essential for adaptive motor control. Recent efficient musculoskeletal simulators and machine learning algorithms provide new computational approaches to gain insights into those concepts for biological motor control. Firstly, I will present a hypothesis-driven modeling framework to quantitatively assess the computations underlying proprioception. We trained thousands of models to transform muscle spindle inputs according to 16 different hypotheses from the literature. For all those hypotheses, we found that hierarchical models that better satisfy those hypotheses, also explain neural recordings in the brain stem and cortex better. We furthermore find that models trained to estimate the state of the body are best at explaining neural data. Secondly, I will discuss key methods (inductive biases, latent exploration, and curricula) to close the gap between reinforcement learning algorithms and biological motor control. Taken together, these results highlight the importance of inductive biases, and experience for biological motor control.

Meeting room: Centre Broca

Assistant professor
Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences
Stanford University School of Medicine.

Invited by Anna Beyeler (Magendie)