[2] Dehaene was one of ten people to be awarded the James S. McDonnell Foundation Centennial Fellowship[3] in 1999 for his work on the "Cognitive Neuroscience of Numeracy".

[1] Dehaene completed his PhD in Experimental Psychology in 1989 with Jacques Mehler at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), Paris.

Together with Pierre Pica, and Elizabeth Spelke, Stanislas Dehaene has studied the numeracy and numeral expressions of the Mundurucu (an indigenous tribe living in Para, Brazil).

[22] To explore the neural basis of this global neuronal workspace, he has conducted functional neuroimaging experiments of masking and the attentional blink, which show that information that reaches conscious awareness leads to increased activation in a network of parietal and frontal regions.

[26] In addition, Dehaene has used brain imaging to study language processing in monolingual and bilingual subjects, and in collaboration with Laurent Cohen, the neural basis of reading.

[30] Dehaene, Cohen and colleagues have subsequently demonstrated that, rather than being a single area, the VWFA is the highest stage in a hierarchy of visual feature extraction for letter and word recognition.

[31][32] More recently, they have turned their attention to how learning to read may depend on a process of "neuronal recycling" that causes brain circuits originally evolved for object recognition to become tuned to recognize frequent letters, pairs of letters and words,[33] and have tested these ideas examining brain responses in a group of adults who did not learn to read due to social and cultural constraints.