Laurent Mottron

Laurent Mottron (born June 13, 1952) in France, is a psychiatrist, researcher, and a professor at Montreal University.

He is a specialist in cognitive neuroscience research in autism at the University of Montreal.

He studied medicine at the University François-Rabelais (Tours) and in 1981 a medical thesis entitled how the opposition neurosis / psychosis works, and defended in 1983, a state thesis in humanities and sciences, entitled Common constraints to the acquisition, theory and pathology of the deixis at the University Paris 5-René Descartes.

He has lived in Quebec since 1990, where he is now a full professor in the Department of Psychiatry at the Université de Montréal.

Since 1997, his research was funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR).

Several of his students now pursue an academic career, including Isabelle Soulières and Claudine Jacques.

One of the particularities of his group is to regularly include autistic researchers, as Michelle Dawson, with whom he has been collaborating for more than fifteen years.

He is married to Quebec researcher Sylvie Belleville and is the father of three children, including singer and songwriter Pierre Mottron.

He has authored over 150 scientific papers on cognitive neuroscience and autism.

His early work is part of the general neuropsychology of pervasive developmental disorders and focuses on visual and auditory perception in savant and non-savant autism, studied through cognitive tasks and brain imaging.

He is also interested in re-examining the role of intellectual disability, identifiable mutations and epilepsy in primary and syndromic autism, and the inclusion of autistic researchers in science.

Along with the cognitive neuroscience research group on autism in Montreal, he develops the model of Enhanced Perceptual Functioning (2006), an influencing theory for interpreting cognitive and imaging data in autism.

He holds the Marcel and Rolande Gosselin Research Chair in Cognitive Neuroscience of Autism at the University of Montreal since 2008, and is a fellow of the Canadian Academy of Health Sciences since 2019.

In a letter published by Le Monde in 2012, Laurent Mottron expresses that he left France for Canada as opposed to the psychoanalytic approach of autism: "psychoanalysis has nothing to say or to do with the autism. Psychoanalysis is a belief, a practice that must remain limited to a relationship between consenting adults. It must be taken out of the care, especially of children (and not just autism). I went to Canada to flee that twenty years ago’’. In this letter, he also expresses his opposition to the ABA method, which he considers "scientifically unjustified and ethically questionable". In Cerveau & Psycho, he writes: "Psychoanalysis has brought nothing to the understanding or the management of autism, neither in terms of practices nor in terms of knowledge".

This model has been extended recently by that of veridical mapping (2013), on the strengths and talents of autistic, and the trigger-threshold-target model (2014), on the links between mutations involved in autism, microstructural and regional plasticity, and enhanced perceptual functioning.

In the area of intervention, he and his collaborators Véronique Langlois and Valérie Courchesne develop an intervention program based on autistic forces.

More recently, he and his collaborators are trying to re-construct de novo "prototypical" phenotype of this condition, in order to reason its uncontrolled increasing reported prevalence.