Professors, Assistant Professors and PhD students from the ENES lab are strongly involved in teaching at the Université Jean Monnet - Saint-Etienne. Our teachings include:
- Animal cognition
- Behavioural ecology
- Animal communication
- Ethology
- Physiology
- Ecology
- Information theory
- Statistics


Equipe de Neuro-Ethologie Sensorielle
BIOACOUSTICS RESEARCH LAB
Research Project:
The baby’s cry: An integrative approach

Crying is a vital built-in survival mechanism for the human baby. Yet, despite this, the information encoded in cries remains poorly understood, and the factors driving the perception of cries by adult listeners have not been thoroughly investigated. Using modern tools of digital signal processing and well-designed systematic playback experiments, the present project aims to fill this gap.
The objectives of the project are 1) to determine the information content of human babies’ cries, deciphering how information is coded by the cries’ acoustic features, 2) to investigate cry perception, cry-induced brain activation, and cry-induced attention and cognition disruption in adult caregivers, depending on the cry’s acoustic properties (e.g. pitch or roughness) which can express various degrees of stress and distress levels, 3) to investigate the process of familiarization between parents and their baby and characterize its impact of parental assessment of baby’s cries, and 4) to assess how sex and culture influence the perception of cries and the subsequent behavioral response of adult listeners.
Partenaires :
Equipe SNA-EPIS EA4607, Université de Saint-Etienne
Equipe Cognitions Humaines et Artificielle EA4004, Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes
Equipe Intégration centrale de la douleur chez l'Homme, NeuroPain, CRNL
