Alice Clerouin

Current Position

I am a  PhD student under the co-supervision of Raphaël Le Bouc (MBB - ICM) and Emmanuel Mandonnet (FrontLab - ICM).

Project
Social norms are a hallmark of human civilization, guiding collective behavior and maintaining societal stability. However, the mechanisms underlying social norm violation and transgression remain largely unknown. Violations of social norms occur in various neuropsychiatric disorders, providing a unique window into the physiopathology of these mechanisms. My project aims to unravel the cognitive and neural bases of social norm compliance and violation, using behavioral, computational, imaging, and clinical approaches.

We will study social norm compliance from a decision theory perspective, using methods we successfully used in the field of behavioral neuroscience. We will test the hypothesis that social norm compliance involves three key mechanistic levels: 1) the semantic representation of non-social and social concepts and others’ mental states, which serve as inputs to the next level; 2) the valuation of personal and social outcomes; 3) the arbitration between self-interest and various social costs under the influence of cognitive control.

Background

I am a Normalienne Student at the Ecole Normale Supérieure (ENS) Ulm where I completed my Bachelor’s degree in Biology and the Master’s 1 IMaLiS with classes in neurosciences. During this first year of master, I did a 4-month in Karolinska Institutet (Sweden), working on the heritability of neural responses to socio-affective face processing in a twin study, using fMRI, under the supervision of Kristoffer Månsson. I then took a gap year, during which I  completed a 6-month internship in the Riken Brain Institute (Japan), working on TMS as a way to modulate human subjects’ ability to do mental imagery, under the supervision of Hakwan Lau and Alexei Dawes. I completed my 2nd year of master at Sorbonne Université, in the BIP master (cognitive and behavioral neurosciences track) where I conducted a 5-month internship with Raphaël Le Bouc at the ICM, working on the basis of my PhD.

Contact

alice.clerouin@icm-institute.org