Dr Louis Renoult joined UEA as a lecturer in Psychology in September 2013. He completed his PhD at McGill University (Montreal, Canada) in 2010 and was a post-doctoral researcher at the Rotman Research Institute (Baycrest, Toronto) and at the University of Ottawa from 2010 to 2013.

His main research focus is the cognitive neuroscience of memory. He uses behavioural as well as functional neuroimaging methods in his research.

Indicative Publications

Renoult, L. Irish, M., Moscovitch, M., Rugg, M.D. (2019) From Knowing to Remembering: the Semantic-Episodic distinction. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 23:12, 1041-1057.

Renoult, L., Davidson, P.S.R., Schmitz, E., Park, L., Campbell, K., Moscovitch, M., Levine, B. (2015) Autobiographically significant concepts: More episodic than semantic in nature? An electrophysiological investigation of overlapping types of memory. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 27:1, 57-72.

Renoult, L., Davidson, P.S.R., Palombo, D.J., Moscovitch, M., Levine, B. (2012). Personal Semantics: At the crossroads of semantic and episodic memory. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16:11, 550-558. 

Renoult, L., Wang, X., Calcagno, V., Prévost, M., Debruille, J.B. (2012). From N400 to N300: Variations in the timing of semantic processing with repetition. Neuroimage, 61, 206-215.

My general interest is in the field of Cognitive Neuroscience of memory and more precisely in the characterization of the similarities, differences, and interactions between semantic and episodic memory in young and older adults.

My research interests span three main areas:

1- Personal semantic memory.
Personal semantics concerns the knowledge we have about our past and about ourselves. These aspects of autobiographical memory have been much less studied than episodic memory processes. The goal of this work is thus to understand if personal semantic memory is a homogeneous and distinct declarative memory system or if this type of knowledge emerges from interactions between the semantic, episodic and self-reference systems (Renoult et al., 2012, 2015, 2016, 2019; 2020; Sheldon et al., 2020; Tanguay et al., 2018, 2020, 2021).

2- The structural aspects of conceptual representations.
This part of my research aims to better understand how we extract meaning from stimuli. Our conceptual knowledge is often considered relatively static. I aim to characterize the plasticity of conceptual representations in various contexts and experimental conditions. In previous work, I have looked at semantic processing in relation to contextual novelty (i.e., whether a stimulus is repeated or presented for the first time in an experiment; Debruille & Renoult, 2009; Renoult et al., 2010; Renoult & Debruille, 2011; Renoult et al., 2012). More recent work aims to compare conceptual representations and their elementary attributes in tasks in which meaning has to be explicitly processed and in tasks in which meaning is not task-relevant (e.g., lexical decision tasks; Renoult, Wang, Mortimer and Debruille, 2012; López Zunini, Renoult & Taler, 2017).

3- The neural correlates of subsequent memory over multiple study episodes.
A great deal of what we remember has been experienced or rehearsed several times. Repeated exposure can indeed aid memory encoding considerably, even if mere rehearsal may not be efficient. However, the vast majority of existing studies have had participants study each to-be-remembered item just once. The neurocognitive processes that promote memory formation across multiple study episodes are thus largely unknown. I am thus studying these processes during multiple exposures with the same objects (Renoult, Wang, Calcagno, Prévost, Debruille, 2012; Sievers, Bird & Renoult, 2019), with a particular focus on how different degrees of similarity in neural activity predict memory formation.

Get in touch if you are interested to join the lab.

PSY-6009A  Brain and Cognition

PSY-7010A  Cognitive Neuroscience

PSY-6002Y  Research Project

Memory, Language Comprehension, Ageing, Functional Neuroimaging