[Research]

What makes us Human? 

How do we adapt to a rapidly changing environment? 

Executive functions are particularly developed in humans and rely on various types of everyday decision-making. My research focuses on the neural bases of creativity and value-based decision-making, i.e. decisions involving our subjective preferences.

During my PhD in Paris, at the ICM, I investigated the Brain Valuation System  in humans. It's a network involved in subjective valuation and decision-making processes. I used behavioral investigation (Lopez-Persem et al, Plos Computational Biology 2017), fMRI (Lopez-Persem et al, e-Life 2016) and iEEG (Lopez-Persem et al, Nature Neuroscience, 2020). Then, during a first post-doc at the University of Oxford, in the Department of Experimental Psychology, I focused on two subparts of the Brain Valuation System, the vmPFC and the OFC in humans and non-human primates. The goal was to better understand how the morphology (Lopez-Persem et al, Journal of Neuroscience 2019) and functional connectivity (Lopez-Persem et al, PNAS 2020) of these regions affects their functional organization within the rest of the brain. I joined the FrontLab, at the ICM, in February 2020 to conduct a project on « How to be creative: a neuro-computational approach to the investigation and enhancement of creative abilities ». Using computational modeling and fMRI, our goal is to understand how the different executive functions and cortical networks involved in creativity are functionally implemented and dynamically interacting.