Biographie

 Yves Paulignan is a neuroscientist and specialist in the analysis of movement at the Laboratory for Language, Cognition and the Brain at the Institute for Cognitive Science (CNRS-University Lyon 1) in Bron, France. He joined the Brain & Language team in 2003 and is a permanent member. In 2009 he replaced Tatjana Nazir as head of team.

By manipulating object position and size, his initial work contributed to the understanding of how prehension movement is organized. Following a post-doc in the lab of Pr. Rizzolatti in Parma and in the lab of Pr. Viviani in Geneva, he then demonstrated the role of the “opposition axis” for object grasping. In 1999 Yves Paulignan joined the team of Driss Boussaoud at the Institut des Sciences Cognitives in Lyon to apply fine-grained movement analysis to monkeys.

Together with James Kilner, Yves Paulignan demonstrated the perturbing effect of observing other’s movement on ones own actions. When he joined the Brain & Language team he then developed with Tatjana Nazir the idea of functional links between action, perception and language. His innovative application of fine-grained movement analysis during language processing led to important insights into the nature of shared network between language and action.

Yves Paulignan is member of the Comité de Protection des Personnes (Ethical committee) since 2000.