Project description
Identifying brain processes during naturalistic decision-making
For many years, the reductionist approach dominated research on how the brain makes decisions, but it was limited in its ability to provide insight into the prefrontal cortex’s role in decision-making, planning and motivation. Funded by the European Research Council, the FORAGINGCORTEX project aims to fill this gap by taking a multidisciplinary approach that links cognitive decision processes with sequential and self-determined behaviours. Drawing on insights from ecology, biology, psychology and neuroscience, the project will seek to identify and classify key components of complex, intelligent and adaptive behaviour. The ultimate goal is to build a computational model that can simulate these processes so that we can understand behaviour in more realistic and holistic environments than traditional reductionist approaches allow.
Objective
Being able to make adaptive decisions and follow through is crucial for animals and humans alike. While some simplifications of real life environments are necessary for laboratory settings, past studies have often removed essential complexity. Specifically, a common reductionist approach toward decision making focuses exclusively on a neuro-economic framing. However, this neglects that in the real world, behaviour is often a sequence of choices, requiring planning and sustained motivation to reach our goals. Only by examining cognition and behaviour embedded in these sequences can we gain a full understanding of prefrontal cortex function in general and its cognitive, computational and neural role in sequential behaviours in particular. To answer this challenge, over the last couple of years, I have been at the forefront of developing a new neuro-ethological approach enabled by advances in computational modeling, experimental designs, brain recording annd stimulation techniques. In the proposal, I have identified key cognitive processes linked to challenges the prefrontal cortex has evolved to solve. For prefrontal cortex, this means sequential and selfdetermined behaviours. To make the complexity tractable, I take inspiration from multiple disciplines including ecology, biology, psychology and neuroscience. This way, I can identify the essential elements for achieving adaptive complex behaviour as a response to real-life challenges and build unifying computational models around those processes.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
- HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC) Main Programme
Topic(s)
Funding Scheme
ERC - Support for frontier research (ERC)Host institution
75654 Paris
France