Juliane Farthouat

• Ph.D
• Consultant at Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FNRS)

To study the properties of human primary somatosensory (S1) cortex as well as its role in cognitive and social processes, it is necessary to noninvasively localize the cortical representations of the body. Being arguably the most relevant body parts for tactile exploration, cortical representations of fingers are of particular interest. The aim of...

Hypnopedia, or the capacity to learn during sleep, is debatable. De novo acquisition of reflex stimulus-response associations was shown possible both in man and animal. Whether sleep allows more sophisticated forms of learning remains unclear. We recorded during diurnal Non-Rapid Eye Movement (NREM) sleep auditory magnetoencephalographic (MEG) freq...

Slow wave sleep (SWS) is characterized by the predominance of delta waves and slow oscillations, reflecting the synchronized activity of large cortical neuronal populations. Amongst other functions, SWS plays a crucial role in the restorative capacity of sleep. Rhythmic Acoustic Stimulation (RAS) during SWS has been shown a cost-effective method to...

The presentation of learning-related cues during sleep, a procedure known as targeted memory reactivation (TMR), is a promising approach to bias sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Recent evidence suggests that for the TMR procedure to be effective, an undisturbed short plastic period is needed after cueing. In this study, we investigated the imp...

Humans are highly sensitive to statistical regularities in their environment. This phenomenon, usually referred as statistical learning, is most often assessed using post-learning behavioural measures that are limited by a lack of sensibility and do not monitor the temporal dynamics of learning. In the present study, we used magnetoencephalographic...

Consistent evidence indicates that sleep participates in memory consolidation processes, possibly through the replay of learning-related neuronal activity. Besides animal data, noninvasive brain imaging studies in man (mostly using positron emission tomography [PET] and functional magnetic resonance imaging [fMRI]) have shown the spontaneous reacti...