Audition and vision are two fields of research that have always faced one another. From psychophysics to cognitive neuroscience, the discoveries and models of one have often preceded those of the other, without it ever being entirely clear which came first—the chicken or the egg. The day will focus on three different aspects of visual and auditory perception and how we can model them, what are common, what are different, what is better understood by one and less by the other, and in the end how we could better understand both: the perception of textures, the perception of voices and faces, and the hierarchical nature (or not) of the visual and auditory systems.

• When: Thursday July 7th 2026 14:00 to 18:00
• Where: salle Henri Gastaut (ground floor), Institut de Neurosciences de la Timone (INT), 27 Boulevard Jean Moulin, 13005 Marseille](https://goo.gl/maps/MLpmsN9cd2N1Uv1L7).
• Organisers: Etienne Thoret, Anna Montagnini, Guillaume Masson, Laurent Perrinet (INT, AMU/CNRS)

Omnipresent in science, models are never more than imperfect analogies of natural phenomena. Models reduce, divide, simplify, or complexify a reality that is not always observable or measurable. Food for thought, models sometimes become theory, but they must never become dogma, lest they mislead us. In this sense, as George Box reminded us, “all models are wrong”! True—but the very nature of this falsifiability is that it helps us think more clearly about the world and better predict the phenomena that make it up. Whether biological, physical, ecological, or geological, models allow us to simulate, predict, and formulate new hypotheses, thereby pushing back the boundaries of knowledge. The history of science has been nourished by these constant back-and-forth movements between models and observations, and it is in this sense that, although they are all wrong, they are indeed all useful. In this lecture series, we wish to highlight modeling as a central aspect of the scientific approach. For this first edition, we wanted to bring into dialogue research on the modeling of visual and auditory systems.

Program

10h30 | Welcome coffee

11h00 | Introduction | Etienne Thoret

Session 1 | Grey things, gratings, both?

Moderation. Guillaume Masson

• 11h25 | Ruben Coen-Cagli, Vision
• 11h50 | Yves Boubenec, Audition
• 12h15 | Discussion

12h30 | Lunch break

Session 2 | Hearing faces and seeing voices

Moderation. Anna Montagnini

• 14h00 | Pascal Belin, Audition
• 14h25 | Frédéric Gosselin, Vision
• 14h50 | Discussion

15h05 | Coffee break

Session 3 | Hearing faces and seeing voices

Moderation. Etienne Thoret

• 15h30 | Jonathan Vacher, Vision
• 15h45 | HiJee Kang, Audition
• 16h10 | Discussion

Session 4 | Deep representations are not so deep

Moderation. Laurent Perrinet

• 16h25 | Marie Plégat, Audition
• 16h50 | Josephine Raugel, Vision
• 17h15 | Brice Bathellier, Audition
• 17h40 | Discussion

17h50 | Closing words

18h00 | Refreshments