Cédric Foucault

Contact: cedric.foucault at gmail dot com
Google Scholar • GitHub • LinkedIn
CV

I’m a third-year PhD student in cognitive computational neuroscience at NeuroSpin, University of Paris-Saclay, supervised by Florent Meyniel in the Computational Brain team. In 2024, I will be working in the Department of Experimental Psychology at the University of Oxford as a Junior Research Fellow at Christ Church College.

My research broadly seeks to understand the learning and decision-making processes involved when humans are confronted with dynamic and changing environments, using computational models, behavioural and neuroimaging experiments. During my PhD, I’ve specifically studied learning and the dynamic and adaptive nature of learning, through multiple levels of investigation:

  1. At the computational level. I studied how recurrent neural networks (RNNs) solve dynamic learning tasks and dissected their mechanisms to understand how it could be done in the brain. Research article published: Foucault & Meyniel, 2021, eLife, doi: 10.7554/eLife.71801. Code available on GitHub.

  2. At the neural level. fMRI project entitled “A neural code for probabilities”. I am investigating how probabilities are neurally encoded as they are learned by the human brain. Paper in preparation.

  3. At the behavioural level. I’ve conducted a study using a novel paradigm specifically designed to measure the fine-grained dynamics of learning in humans, via continuous behavior tracking. Paper in preparation.

Previously, I did a Master of research in cognitive neuroscience at the École Normale Supérieure de Paris (2018 - 2020), a Master of research in computer science at the École Normale Supérieure Paris-Saclay (2010 – 2014), and worked as an iOS Software engineer at Apple in California in between (2015 – 2018).

See my CV for more information and feel free to contact me at my email above.