Barbu Revencu is a cognitive scientist based in Paris, with an interest in symbols and the language of thought. His doctoral research, supervised by Gergely Csibra and Dan Sperber at the Central European University in Vienna, focused on the cognitive mechanism that enables us to interpret symbols in mental representations. He developed a theoretical framework for this uniquely human capacity and provided empirical evidence of its presence in infants.
After completing his PhD, he was awarded a Fyssen Fellowship to undertake postdoctoral research with Stanislas Dehaene at NeuroSpin, where he studied adults’ mental language representations in the context of geometric shapes. As part of the ERC Mental Files project, he is currently developing a brain imaging paradigm to investigate how adults associate perceptual object files with discursive files in symbolic contexts where objects are used as symbols for distal entities.
