Project description
How the brain guides flexible behaviour
Adaptive skills are important, but it is still not fully understood how the brain achieves them. The ERC-funded CogFlex project aims to study how thinking and feeling work together to guide behaviour. The study will focus on the hippocampus, which charts the structure of the world, and the prefrontal cortex, which uses these charts to guide decision making. The study will employ high-resolution fMRI, intracranial recordings, computer models, and non-invasive brain stimulation. The goal is to understand how feelings form maps, modify learning, and influence behaviour. By identifying the brain functions behind behaviour, CogFlex seeks to link thinking and emotion and create opportunities for mental health treatments based on personal cognitive-emotional traits.
Objective
The ability to adapt behavior to unfamiliar situations is crucial in our complex and ever-changing world. In such circumstances, we often rely on the statistical structure of our environment, allowing us to generalize previously learned behaviors to new, similar situations. Two brain regions are key to this flexibility: the hippocampus, which creates cognitive maps that represent the structure of the world, and the prefrontal cortex, which accesses and uses these representations based on current task demands.
In addition to their cognitive functions, both regions are also involved in regulating emotional aspects of our experiences. However, even though it is often the interplay between cognition and emotion that plays a central role in well-being and psychopathology, cognition and emotion are often studied in isolation. CogFlex challenges this compartmentalized view and proposes a unified framework, suggesting that emotions directly shape how we represent the world and thereby influence how we generalize, update, and act on information.
Using a combination of sophisticated human neuroscience methods, including high-resolution functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), intracranial recordings, and advanced computational models, CogFlex will offer unprecedented details in how the human brain forms, uses, updates and selects cognitive maps and how emotions interact with these processes. Notably, CogFlex will move beyond observing correlations by non-invasively manipulating hippocampal and prefrontal representations using transcranial temporal interference stimulation (tTIS), offering causal insight into the role these brain regions play in selecting and using cognitive maps for guiding flexible behavior.
Through this integrative approach, CogFlex will provide a deep mechanistic understanding of the neurobiological basis of flexible behavior and lay the foundation for more personalized mental health interventions based on individual cognitive-affective phenotypes
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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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)
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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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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.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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97070 Wuerzburg
Germany
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