Cognition and Neurocomputations of motivation and planning

Project Information

FORAGINGCORTEX

Grant agreement ID: 101076247

DOI

10.3030/101076247

EC signature date 27 January 2023

Start date 1 May 2023

End date 30 April 2028

Funded under

• European Research Council (ERC)

Total cost

€ 1 652 950,00

EU contribution

€ 1 652 950,00

Coordinated by

INSTITUT NATIONAL DE LA SANTE ET DE LA RECHERCHE MEDICALE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - FORAGINGCORTEX (Cognition and Neurocomputations of motivation and planning)

Reporting period: 2023-05-01 to 2025-10-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

We all make an endless number of decisions every day, from the trivial to the profound. Cognitive neuroscience has thus far focused on relatively narrow types of decisions, namely economic decisions between a limited set of presented offers, neglecting other real-life forms of choice. We have been at the forefront of developing a new perspective, which aims to expand our understanding of decision making by identifying evolutionarily essential decision types. One key aspect of natural behaviours is that they are self-generated. Animals in the wild need to decide when and how to accomplish essential goals (e.g. foraging for food) and predict how the world is going to change in the future. A second aspect is the fact that most decisions are happen in sequence and are temporally extended. Thus, the ability to plan, implement those plans and pursue goals bit-by-bit over long stretches of time are essential for primates. In this grant, we are targeting these aspects to better understand how people make decisions in the real world. Beyond understanding more about the underlying cognitive processes and building mathematical models of behaviour, we are also interested in the underlying brain mechanisms. For this we use a variety of neuroimaging tools as well as try to causally change brain activity using transcranial ultrasound stimulation (TUS), non-invasively, transiently and reversibly.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

Currently, the primary achievements of this grant relate to three published papers, (Holton et al, 2024, Grohn et al., 2024 and Kolling & Scholl 2024) as well as new behavioural task development, cognitive models that explain the behaviours we observe and analyses of previously existing data to test the implications of our ideas. As this is an ambitious set of projects, setting up the data collection phase is an equally ambitious undertaking but we are very close to collecting our first large sets of original data, which required our whole team designing, setting up and modelling many aspects to prepare for data collection.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

Beyond our works clear benefit for further basic research on decision making and reward learning, we have built several clinical links to ensure our work has wider impact for mental health and wider society. Specifically, we collaborate with psychiatrists and clinical researchers in Lyon and Paris to understand what cognitive and brain mechanisms are changed in mental disorders such as personality or mood disorders.