Project description
Rethinking the brain’s social secrets
Our ability to understand and respond to social information is crucial for individual success and societal well-being. Despite this importance, people show significant differences in their ability to process social cues. The reasons behind this variance remain unclear, particularly regarding the role of large-scale interactions between brain networks. Understanding these interactions could unlock key insights into social behaviour and its disorders. With this in mind, the ERC-funded BeyondMapping project will study the neural mechanisms of social information processing. Using advanced tools like ultra-high field fMRI and covert neurofeedback, researchers will explore brain network dynamics and their impact on social abilities, ultimately driving progress toward personalised treatment for social disorders.
Objective
Social information pervades every aspect of our lives, and our ability to process it and respond appropriately is essential to our success as individuals and of society as a whole. Despite its critical importance, there are profound individual differences in social processing abilities. The key to understanding this variance may lie beyond isolated cortical regions, in the poorly understood large-scale interactions between different cortical networks which facilitate the integration of information and the execution of complex tasks. We propose a novel framework, designed to introduce new tools to the study of some of the most fundamental questions in social neuroscience: are there dedicated brain mechanisms for the processing of social information? What goes wrong in social information processing disorders, and how does social information processing relate to social anxiety? Do these abilities fluctuate over long time scales (years)? Can we predict their change? We will create new behavioral tasks to tease apart social task elements, and objectively estimate individual social processing abilities using our innovative measure of typicality. We will quantify individual differences in performance on social tasks, and identify the variance in neural activity which predicts them from a wide range of network features at the high resolution of ultra-high field 7 Tesla fMRI. This will yield testable hypotheses about the links between networks and social behavior. Finally and most crucially, to test these hypotheses, we will use covert neurofeedback, a cutting-edge technique which I have been developing, to perturb the networks, establishing their causal contribution to behavior.
The combination of novel behavioral, neurocomputational, and above all perturbation tools for testing causality, will provide insights which will profoundly impact our understanding of social information processing in health, and advance the reality of personalized treatment of social disorders.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
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Call for proposal
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Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-STG
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7610001 Rehovot
Israel
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