ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

My proposal seeks to explain the complex interplay between genetic and environmental causes of individual variation in substance use and the risk for abuse. Substance use is common. Substances like nicotine and cannabis have well-known negative health consequences, while alcohol and caffeine use may be both beneficial and detrimental, depending on quantity and frequency of use. Twin studies (including my own) demonstrated that both heritable and environmental factors play a role. My proposal on substance use (nicotine, alcohol, cannabis and caffeine) is organized around several key objectives: 1. To unravel the complex contribution of genetic and environmental factors to substance use by using extended twin family designs; 2. To identify and confirm genes and gene networks involved in substance use by using DNA-variant data; 3. To explore gene expression patterns with RNA data in substance users versus non-users; 4. To investigate biomarkers in substance users versus non-users using blood or urine; 5. To unravel relation between substance use and health by linking twin-family data to national medical databases. To realize these aims I will use the extensive resources of the Netherlands Twin Register (NTR); including both the longitudinal phenotype database and the biological samples. I have been involved in data collection, coordination of data collection and analyzing NTR data since 1999. With my comprehensive experience in data collection, data analyses and my knowledge in the field of behavior genetics and addiction research I will be able to successfully lead this cutting-edge project. Additional data crucial for the project will be collected by my team. Large samples will be available for this study and state-of-the art methods will be used to analyze the data. All together, my project will offer powerful approaches to unravel the complex interaction between genetic and environmental causes of individual differences in substance use and the risk for abuse.

1 491 964 €

Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2017-05-31

Alfonsine astronomy is arguably among the first European scientific achievements. It shaped a scene for actors like Regiomontanus or Copernicus. There is however little detailed historical analysis encompassing its development in its full breadth. ALFA addresses this issue by studying tables, instruments, mathematical and theoretical texts in a methodologically innovative way relying on approaches from the history of manuscript cultures, history of mathematics, and history of astronomy. ALFA integrates these approaches not only to benefit from different perspectives but also to build new questions from their interactions. For instance the analysis of mathematical practices in astral sciences manuscripts induces new ways to analyse the documents and to think about astronomical questions. Relying on these approaches the main objectives of ALFA are thus to: - Retrace the development of the corpus of Alfonsine texts from its origin in the second half of the 13th century to the end of the 15th century by following, on the manuscript level, the milieus fostering it; - Analyse the Alfonsine astronomers’ practices, their relations to mathematics, to the natural world, to proofs and justification, their intellectual context and audiences; - Build a meaningful narrative showing how astronomers in different milieus with diverse practices shaped, also from Arabic materials, an original scientific scene in Europe. ALFA will shed new light on the intellectual history of the late medieval period as a whole and produce a better understanding of its relations to related scientific periods in Europe and beyond. It will also produce methodological breakthroughs impacting the ways history of knowledge is practiced outside the field of ancient and medieval sciences. Efforts will be devoted to bring these results not only to the relevant scholarly communities but also to a wider audience as a resource in the public debates around science, knowledge and culture.

1 871 250 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

In this project, innovative techniques to reconstruct ancient economies are developed and new insights in the trade and processing of mineral raw materials are gained based on interdisciplinary archaeological and archaeometrical research. An innovative methodology for and a practical provenance database of the primary origin of natron glass from the Hellenistic-Roman world will be established. The project investigates both production and consumer sites of glass raw materials using both typo-chronological and archaeometrical (isotope geochemical) study of finished glass artefacts at consumer sites as well as mineralogical and chemical characterisation of raw glass and mineral resources at primary production sites. Suitable sand resources in the locations described by ancient authors will be identified through geological prospecting on the basis of literature review and field work. Sand and flux (natron) deposits will be mineralogically and geochemically characterised and compared to the results of the archaeological and geochemical investigations of the glass. Through integrated typo-chronological and archaeometrical analysis, the possible occurrence of primary production centres of raw glass outside the known locations in Syro-Palestine and Egypt, particularly in North-Africa, Italy, Spain and Gaul will be critically studied. In this way, historical, archaeological and archaeometrical data are combined, developing new interdisciplinary techniques for innovative archaeological interpretation of glass trade in the Hellenistic-Roman world.

954 960 €

Start date: 2009-11-01, End date: 2014-10-31

This project has the potential to radically change current understanding of cultic and social transformation in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem (c. 6th-4th centuries BCE), an important formative phase of ancient Judaism. “BABYLON” draws on recent, ground-breaking advances in the study of cuneiform texts to illuminate the Babylonian environment of the Judean exile, the socio-historical context which gave rise to the transformative era in Second Temple Judaism. In particular, these new data show that the parallels between Babylonian and post-exilic forms of cultic and social organization were substantially more far-reaching than presently recognized in Biblical scholarship. “BABYLON” will study the extent of these similarities and explore the question how Babylonian models could have influenced the restoration effort in Jerusalem. This goal will be achieved through four sub-projects. P1 will study the social dynamics and intellectual universe of the Babylonian priesthood. P2 will finalize the publication of cuneiform archives of Babylonian priests living in the time of the exile. P3 will identify the exact areas of change in the post-exilic temple community of Jerusalem. P4, the synthesis, will draw from each of these sub-projects to present a comparative study of the Second Temple and contemporary Babylonian models of cultic and social organization, and to propose a strategy of research into the possible routes of transmission between Babylonia and Jerusalem. The research will be carried out by three team members: the PI (P1 and P4), a PhD in Assyriology (P2) and a post-doctoral researcher in Biblical Studies specialized in the Second Temple period (P3 and P4). The participation of the wider academic community will be invited at two moments in the course of the project, in the form of a workshop and an international conference. “BABYLON” will adopt an interdisciplinary approach by bringing together Assyriologists and Biblical scholars for a much-needed dialogue, thereby exploding the artificial boundaries that currently exist in the academic landscape between these two fields.

1 200 000 €

Start date: 2009-09-01, End date: 2015-08-31

The Bantu Expansion is not only the main linguistic, cultural and demographic process in Late Holocene Africa. It is also one of the most controversial issues in African History that still has political repercussions today. It has sparked debate across the disciplines and far beyond Africanist circles in an attempt to understand how the young Bantu language family (ca. 5000 years) could spread over large parts of Central, Eastern and Southern Africa. This massive dispersal is commonly seen as the result of a single migratory macro-event driven by agriculture, but many questions about the movement and subsistence of ancestral Bantu speakers are still open. They can only be answered through real interdisciplinary collaboration. This project will unite researchers with outstanding expertise in African archaeology, archaeobotany and historical linguistics to form a unique cross-disciplinary team that will shed new light on the first Bantu-speaking village communities south of the rainforest. Fieldwork is planned in parts of the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Republic of Congo and Angola that are terra incognita for archaeologists to determine the timing, location and archaeological signature of the earliest villagers and to establish how they interacted with autochthonous hunter-gatherers. Special attention will be paid to archaeobotanical and palaeoenvironmental data to get an idea of their subsistence, diet and habitat. Historical linguistics will be pushed beyond the boundaries of vocabulary-based phylogenetics and open new pathways in lexical reconstruction, especially regarding subsistence and land use of early Bantu speakers. Through interuniversity collaboration archaeozoological, palaeoenvironmental and genetic data and phylogenetic modelling will be brought into the cross-disciplinary approach to acquire a new holistic view on the interconnections between human migration, language spread, climate change and early farming in Late Holocene Central Africa.

1 997 500 €

Start date: 2018-01-01, End date: 2022-12-31

The goal of this proposal is to develop and promote Bayesian hypothesis tests for social scientists. By and large, social scientists have ignored the Bayesian revolution in statistics, and, consequently, most social scientists still assess the veracity of experimental effects using the same methodology that was used by their advisors and the advisors before them. This state of affairs is undesirable: social scientists conduct groundbreaking, innovative research only to analyze their results using methods that are old-fashioned or even inappropriate. This imbalance between the science and the statistics has gradually increased the pressure on the field to change the way inferences are drawn from their data. However, three requirements need to be fulfilled before social scientists are ready to adopt Bayesian tests of hypotheses. First, the Bayesian tests need to be developed for problems that social scientists work with on a regular basis; second, the Bayesian tests need to be default or objective; and, third, the Bayesian tests need to be available in a user-friendly computer program. This proposal seeks to make major progress on all three fronts. Concretely, the projects in this proposal build on recent developments in the field of statistics and use the default Jeffreys-Zellner-Siow priors to compute Bayesian hypothesis tests for regression, correlation, the t-test, and different versions of analysis of variance (ANOVA). A similar approach will be used to develop Bayesian hypothesis tests for logistic regression and the analysis of contingency tables, as well as for popular latent process methods such as factor analysis and structural equation modeling. We aim to implement the various tests in a new computer program, Bayes-SPSS, with a similar look and feel as the frequentist spreadsheet program SPSS (i.e., Statistical Package for the Social Sciences). Together, these projects may help revolutionize the way social scientists analyze their data.

1 498 286 €

Start date: 2012-05-01, End date: 2017-04-30

The two fundamental challenges of this project are the integration of medieval Jewries and their histories within the framework of European history without undermining their distinct communal status and the creation of a history of everyday medieval Jewish life that includes those who were not part of the learned elite. The study will focus on the Jewish communities of northern Europe (roughly modern Germany, northern France and England) from 1100-1350. From the mid-thirteenth century these medieval Jewish communities were subject to growing persecution. The approaches proposed to access daily praxis seek to highlight tangible dimensions of religious life rather than the more common study of ideologies to date. This task is complex because the extant sources in Hebrew as well as those in Latin and vernacular were written by the learned elite and will require a broad survey of multiple textual and material sources. Four main strands will be examined and combined: 1. An outline of the strata of Jewish society, better defining the elites and other groups. 2. A study of select communal and familial spaces such as the house, the synagogue, the market place have yet to be examined as social spaces. 3. Ritual and urban rhythms especially the annual cycle, connecting between Jewish and Christian environments. 4. Material culture, as objects were used by Jews and Christians alike. Aspects of material culture, the physical environment and urban rhythms are often described as “neutral” yet will be mined to demonstrate how they exemplified difference while being simultaneously ubiquitous in local cultures. The deterioration of relations between Jews and Christians will provide a gauge for examining change during this period. The final stage of the project will include comparative case studies of other Jewish communities. I expect my findings will inform scholars of medieval culture at large and promote comparative methodologies for studying other minority ethnic groups

1 941 688 €

Start date: 2016-11-01, End date: 2021-10-31

From testicular grafting (1920s) to step counting watches (2014), the perceptions and practices of health seeking individuals have been marked by continuities and profound changes during a twentieth century largely shaped by the advent of a communication society. Visuals can be a source to understand transformations by postulating an interactive, performative power of mass media in societies. Which roles did visuals play in changes from public health and human capital collective understandings of the healthy self to new (sometimes debated) perceptions and practices of our bodies as forms of individual capital in an increasing market-economized world? Pursuing these questions, the project focuses on four fields of investigation -food/nutrition; movement/exercise/sports; sexuality/reproduction/infants and dependency/addiction/overconsumption- in Germany, France and Great Britain studied with an entangled history framework. Within this scope the project aims at understanding (1)how visuals shape our health related self-understandings and practices in a continuity/discontinuity from the bio-political to the bio-economic logic. (2) The project will explore and explain how and why understandings of body capital differ or overlap in European countries. (3) The project will analyse if and how visual media serve as a promotion-communication hyphen for twentieth century preventive-self understanding. With a visual perspective on a long twentieth century, the project seeks to better understand changes and continuities in the history of health intertwined with the history of media. This will provide new insights into how the internalization of bodycapital has evolved throughout the past century, how transformations in the media world (from film to TV to internet) play out at the individual level and how health challenges and cultural differences in body perceptions and practices persist in producing social distinction in an age of global information and advanced health systems.

2 492 124 €

Start date: 2016-09-01, End date: 2021-08-31

The aim of the proposed project is to shed light on early childhood gender-differentiated socialization and gender-specific susceptibility to parenting within families in relation to disruptive behaviour in boys and girls in the first four years of life. The popular saying boys will be boys refers to the observation that boys show more disruptive behaviours (e.g., noncompliance or aggression) than girls, a pattern that has been confirmed frequently in scientific research. There is also evidence that parents treat boys differently from girls in ways that are likely to foster boys disruptive behaviour, and that boys are more susceptible to problematic family functioning than girls. The crucial question is whether gender differences in socialization, susceptibility to socialization, and children s behavioural outcomes are also salient when the same parents are doing the parenting of both a boy and a girl. Within-family comparisons are necessary to account for structural differences between families. To this end, families with two children born 22-26 months apart will be recruited from the general population. To account for birth order and gender-combination effects, the sample includes four groups of 150 families each, with the following sibling combinations: girl-boy, boy-girl, girl-girl, and boy-boy. The study has a four-wave longitudinal design, based on the youngest sibling with assessments at ages 12, 24, 36, and 48 months, because gender differences in disruptive behaviour develop during the toddler years. Each assessment consists of two home visits: one with mother and one with father, including observations of both children and of the children separately. Parenting behaviours will be studied in reaction to specific child behaviours, including aggression, noncompliance, and prosocial behaviours.

1 611 970 €

Start date: 2010-02-01, End date: 2015-03-31

Damage to parietal cortex after stroke causes patients to become unaware of large parts of their surroundings and body parts. This so-called spatial neglect is hypothesised to be brought about by a stroke-induced imbalance between the left and right hemisphere. Some patients experience a partial recovery of lost abilities, but the factors that drive this rebalancing are unknown. The research proposed here will overcome this bottleneck in our understanding of the brain recovery phenomenon, and develop therapeutic approaches that for the first time will control, steer and speed up brain rebalancing after stroke. To that goal, we introduce a revolutionary approach in which TMS, fMRI, and EEG are applied simultaneously in healthy human volunteers to artificially unbalance the brain, and then study and control processes of rebalancing. Because we are one of the few groups worldwide that has accomplished this methodology, and that has the expertise to fully analyse the data it will yield, we are in a unique position to deliver both fundamental insights into brain plasticity, and derived new therapies. In brief, we will use TMS to (i) mimic spatial neglect in healthy volunteers while simultaneously monitoring the underlying neural network effects using fMRI/EEG, and to (ii) determine which exact brain reorganisation leads to an optimal behavioral recovery after injury. Importantly, we will use cutting-edge fMRI pattern recognition and machine learning algorithms to predict which concrete TMS treatment will specifically support this optimal functional reorganisation in the unbalanced brain. Finally, we will directly translate these fundamental findings into clinical practise and apply novel TMS protocols to rebalance the brain in patients suffering from parietal stroke.

1 344 853 €

Start date: 2011-04-01, End date: 2016-03-31

Thanks to the recent advances in mapping brain activation during task performance using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (i.e., studying the brain in action), it is now possible to study one of the oldest questions in psychology: how the development of neural circuitry underlies the development of cognition and emotion. The ‘Storm and Stress’ of adolescence, a period during which adolescents develop cognitively with great speed but are also risk-takers and sensitive to opinions of their peer group, has puzzled scientists for centuries. New technologies of brain mapping have the potential to shed new light on the mystery of adolescence. The approach proposed here concerns the investigation of brain regions which underlie developmental changes in cognitive, emotional and social-emotional functions over the course of child and adolescent development. For this purpose I will measure functional brain development longitudinally across the age range 8-20 years by using a combined cross-sectional longitudinal design including 240 participants. Participants will take part in two testing sessions over a four-year-period in order to track the within-subject time courses of functional brain development for cognitive, emotional and social-emotional functions and to understand how these functions develop relative to each other in the same individuals, using multilevel models for change. The cross-sectional longitudinal assessment of cognitive, emotional and social-emotional functional brain development in relation to brain structure and hormone levels is unique in the international field and has the potential to provide new explanations for old questions. The application of brain mapping combined with multilevel models for change is original, and allows for the examination of developmental trajectories rather than age comparisons. An integrative mapping (i.e., combined with task performance and with biological markers) of functional brain development is important not only for theory development, but also for understanding how children learn new tasks and participate in a complex social world, and eventually to tailor educational programs to the needs of children.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2011-02-01, End date: 2016-01-31

Subjectivity defines the subject who is perceiving, feeling, thinking, acting, and is essential to understand the conscious mind from the inside. However, subjectivity, or non-reflective first-person perspective, is not identified as a core concept in cognitive neuroscience and its neural basis remain largely unknown. BRAVIUS offers a unified framework to appraise both the concept and the neural mechanisms generating subjectivity. The hypothesis relies on two vital organs that generate their own rhythmic electrical activity, the stomach and the heart, and therefore constantly send information up to the neocortex, even in the absence of bodily change. Cortical responses to those visceral organs would define the organism as an entity at the neural level, and create a subject-centered referential from which first-person perspective can develop. In other words, the cardiac and gastric pacemakers could feed the brain with self-specifying inputs. BRAVIUS builds on previous theories and studies on visceral states but focuses on ascending information, from viscera to brain, and does not require visceral states to change nor to be consciously perceived. Experimentally, BRAVIUS measures the understudied neural response evoked by heartbeats and introduces a new measure, the electrogastrogram, to quantify the slow gastric pacemaker. BRAVIUS will test with magneto-encephalography (MEG) the role of neural responses to ascending visceral signals in generating subjectivity by cutting across domains of cognitive sciences and exploring diverse paradigms where subjectivity is engaged: perceptual consciousness, self-consciousness, emotions and decision making. BRAVIUS will further explore how cardiac and gastric ascending signals shape the temporal (MEG) and spatial (fMRI) organization of spontaneous brain activity. The project outcome is a detailed mechanistic neural account of the most private part of the human mind, and a unified concept of subjectivity across cognitive domains.

2 080 000 €

Start date: 2015-12-01, End date: 2020-11-30

For over half a millennium, the great medieval capital of Angkor lay at the heart of a vast empire stretching across much of mainland SE Asia. Recent research has revealed that the famous monuments of Angkor were merely the epicentre of an immense settlement complex, with highly elaborate engineering works designed to manage water and mitigate the uncertainty of monsoon rains. Compelling evidence is now emerging that other temple complexes of the medieval Khmer Empire may also have formed the urban cores of dispersed, low-density settlements with similar systems of hydraulic engineering. Using innovative airborne laser scanning (‘lidar’) technology, CALI will uncover, map and compare archaeological landscapes around all the major temple complexes of Cambodia, with a view to understanding what role these complex and vulnerable water management schemes played in the growth and decline of early civilisations in SE Asia. CALI will evaluate the hypothesis that the Khmer civilisation, in a bid to overcome the inherent constraints of a monsoon environment, became locked into rigid and inflexible traditions of urban development and large-scale hydraulic engineering that constrained their ability to adapt to rapidly-changing social, political and environmental circumstances. By integrating data and techniques from fast-developing archaeological sciences like remote sensing, palaeoclimatology and geoinformatics, this work will provide important insights into the reasons for the collapse of inland agrarian empires in the middle of the second millennium AD, a transition that marks the emergence of modern mainland SE Asia. The lidar data will provide a comprehensive and internally-consistent archive of urban form at a regional scale, and offer a unique experimental space for evaluating socio-ecological resilience, persistence and transformation over two thousand years of human history, with clear implications for our understanding of contemporary urbanism and of urban futures.

1 482 844 €

Start date: 2015-03-01, End date: 2020-02-29

Understanding how values of different options that lead to choice are represented in the brain is a basic scientific question with far reaching implications. I recently showed that by the mere-association of a cue and a button press we could influence preferences of snack food items up to two months following a single training session lasting less than an hour. This novel behavioural change manipulation cannot be explained by any of the current learning theories, as external reinforcement was not used in the process, nor was the context of the decision changed. Current choice theories focus on goal directed behaviours where the value of the outcome guides choice, versus habit-based behaviours where an action is repeated up to the point that the value of the outcome no longer guides choice. However, in this novel task training via the involvement of low-level visual, auditory and motor mechanisms influenced high-level choice behaviour. Thus, the far-reaching goal of this project is to study the mechanism, by which low-level sensory, perceptual and motor neural processes underlie value representation and change in the human brain even in the absence of external reinforcement. I will use behavioural, eye-gaze and functional MRI experiments to test how low-level features influence the neural representation of value. I will then test how they interact with the known striatal representation of reinforced behavioural change, which has been the main focus of research thus far. Finally, I will address the basic question of dynamic neural plasticity and if neural signatures during training predict long term success of sustained behavioural change. This research aims at a paradigmatic shift in the field of learning and decision-making, leading to the development of novel interventions with potential societal impact of helping those suffering from health-injuring behaviours such as addictions, eating or mood disorders, all in need of a long lasting behavioural change.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2017-01-01, End date: 2021-12-31

Language is fundamental to human sociality. While the last century has given us many fundamental insights into how we use and understand it, core issues that we face when doing so within its natural environment—face-to-face conversation—remain untackled. When we speak we also send signals with our head, eyes, face, hands, torso, etc. How do we orchestrate and integrate all this information into meaningful messages? CoAct will lead to a new model with in situ language processing at its core, the Contextualized Action and Language (CoALa) processing model. The defining characteristic of in situ language is its multimodal nature. Moreover, the essence of language use is social action; that is, we use language to do things—we question, offer, decline etc. These social actions are embedded in conversational structure where one speaking turn follows another at a remarkable speed, with millisecond gaps between them. Conversation thus confronts us with a significant psycholinguistic challenge. While one could expect that the many co-speech bodily signals exacerbate this challenge, CoAct proposes that they actually play a key role in dealing with it. It tests this in three subprojects that combine methods from a variety of disciplines but focus on the social actions performed by questions and responses as a uniting theme: (1) ProdAct uses conversational corpora to investigate the multimodal architecture of social actions with the assumption that they differ in their ‘visual signatures’, (2) CompAct tests whether these bodily signatures contribute to social action comprehension, and if they do so early and rapidly, (3) IntAct investigates whether bodily signals play a facilitating role also when faced with the complex task of comprehending while planning a next social action. Thus, CoAct aims to advance current psycholinguistic theory by developing a new model of language processing based on an integrative framework uniting aspects from psychology , philosophy and sociology.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

"Recent developments of high-field functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) have advanced the level of functional detail to sub-millimetre spatial resolution. This is of critical importance because in the mammalian cortex, small functional cortical patches appear to constitute fundamental units of brain function. These functional units are often organized as ""cortical columns"" that contain clusters of neurons with similar functional preferences. The present project will investigate what ""features"" are coded by functional “columnar-level” units in the visual cortex, how represented entities can be decoded from distributed activity patterns, and how modelled intra- and inter-areal connections between feature representations enable neuro-cognitive computations. The research of this project strives towards a new level of insight in the functional organization of the human brain: Instead of describing observed fMRI activity at the level of specialized brain areas, the focus will be shifted towards the content coded within brain regions. The project investigates columnar-level coding in three cross-fertilising sub-projects. In the first sub-project, sophisticated experimental designs, ultra high-field fMRI and advanced data analyses will be combined to unravel columnar-level feature representations and the entities represented by distributed patterns at different levels of the visual hierarchy. In the second sub-project, a large-scale neural network model will be developed with the major goal to integrate measured columnar-level representations in a new theory of invariant object recognition and visual attention. In the third sub-project, high-resolution Brain Computer Interfaces (hr-BCIs) will be created that are based on information extracted from columnar-level representations. The hr-BCIs will implement highly content-specific neurofeedback tools for therapeutic treatment, and advanced communication devices for patients with severe motor impairments."

2 473 381 €

Start date: 2011-05-01, End date: 2016-04-30

For decades the cognitive neuroscience community has expended significant effort identifying system-level neural correlates of human consciousness, broad neural signatures that distinguish conscious from unconscious processes at the level of whole brain regions. Meanwhile, within the field of neurobiology, rapid progress has been made in understanding the neurotransmitter systems underlying basic sensory processes (e.g. in mice, monkeys). This research has, however, been performed in relative isolation from studies of human consciousness, and clear opportunities to link the two levels of description remain largely unexplored. Here I will establish this link by combining state-of-the-art neuroimaging techniques with pharmacological interventions. First, I will validate and refine existing theories of consciousness by isolating system-level neural correlates of consciousness that are invariant across experimental tasks and manipulations. Second, I will test the hypothesis that NMDA receptors play a crucial role in recurrent processing, the dynamic information exchange between brain regions, thought to give rise to consciousness. I will also test the hypothesis that rapid fluctuations in spontaneous network activity (modulating arousal levels), which are controlled by noradrenaline and acetylcholine neuromodulatory systems, determine the likelihood of sensory evoked recurrent processing, and hence consciousness, to occur. Third, I will test the hypothesis that recurrent processing provides the possibility for prolonged and flexible information processing, which could represent a potential function of consciousness. In summary, the proposed research has the potential to gain fundamental insights in the neural causes, rather than simply correlates, of human consciousness, as has been the focus of most previous work. In so doing, the work will advance scientific understanding of the long-debated functional significance of consciousness for human cognition and behavior.

1 499 766 €

Start date: 2017-05-01, End date: 2022-04-30

Everything occurs in a context. We see a car in the context of a street scene and a stove in the context of a kitchen. Context greatly helps the processing of individual objects. Surprisingly however, context hardly plays a role in most models of visual perception, which treat perception as a largely bottom-up categorization process. In this research proposal, I will examine how context changes the cortical computations that give rise to visual perception, focusing on contextual modulations in space and time. Moreover, I will translate this research to a clinical condition that is marked by aberrant context modulations in perception. Firstly, I will examine the influence of spatial context from the surround on cortical processing of individual elements. I aim to uncover the neural mechanisms responsible for the contextual facilitation of features and objects. I hypothesize that spatial context constrains sensory input by changing sensory representations at earlier stages in line with expectations at higher-order stages of perceptual analysis. Secondly, I will examine the influence of temporal context from past history. I hypothesize that temporal contexts trigger cortical waves of neural ‘preplay’ activity, setting up time-varying templates of expected incoming visual input. Thirdly, I will test the clinical significance of this framework to understand perceptual atypicalities in Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). I will empirically test the hypothesis that ASD is marked by deficient processing of contextual information, in both the spatial and temporal domain. This integrative approach has the potential to significantly advance theoretical models of perception, based on underlying neurobiology, and underline the importance of context for understanding perception. Moreover, the knowledge gleaned can have significant societal and clinical impact.

1 499 421 €

Start date: 2016-04-01, End date: 2021-03-31

Societies in past and present are regularly confronted with major hazards, which sometimes have disastrous effects. Some societies are successful in preventing these effects and buffering threats, or they recover quickly, while others prove highly vulnerable. Why is this? Increasingly it is clear that disasters are not merely natural events, and also that wealth and technology alone are not adequate to prevent them. Rather, hazards and disasters are social occurrences as well, and they form a tough test for the organizational capacities of a society, both in mitigation and recovery. This project targets a main element of this capacity, namely: the way societies have organized the exchange, allocation and use of resources. It aims to explain why some societies do well in preventing or remedying disasters through these institutional arrangements and others not. In order to do so, this project analyses four key variables: the mix of coordination systems available within that society, its degree of autarky, economic equity and political equality. The recent literature on historical and present-day disasters suggests these factors as possible causes of success or failure of institutional arrangements in their confrontation with hazards, but their discussion remains largely descriptive and they have never been systematically analyzed. This research project offers such a systematic investigation, using rural societies in Western Europe in the period 1300-1800 - with their variety of socio-economic characteristics - as a testing ground. The historical perspective enables us to compare widely differing cases, also over the long run, and to test for the variables chosen, in order to isolate the determining factors in the resilience of different societies. By using the opportunities offered by history in this way, we will increase our insight into the relative performance of societies and gain a better understanding of a critical determinant of human wellbeing.

2 227 326 €

Start date: 2014-03-01, End date: 2019-02-28

For many years, human cooperation has been praised as beneficial in organizational and personal settings. Indeed, cooperation allows people to develop trust, build meaningful relationships, achieve mutually beneficial outcomes, and strengthen bonding with one's group members. However, while the benefits of cooperation are clear, very little is known about its possible negative aspects. Such negative aspects include the potential emergence of unethical conduct among cooperating partners, or as termed here – corrupt collaboration. Such joint unethical efforts, benefiting (directly or indirectly) one or more of the involved parties, occur in business, sports, and even academia. Corrupt collaboration emerges when one party bends ethical rules (here: lie) to set the stage for another party to further bend ethical rules and get the job done, that is, secure personal profit based on joint unethical acts. We propose that corrupt collaborations most commonly occur when all involved parties gain from the corrupt behavior. The current proposal is aimed at unfolding the roots and nature of corrupt collaborations; their existence, the psychological and biological processes underlying them, and the settings most likely to make corrupt collaboration emerge and spread. Accordingly, the information gathered in the current proposal has the potential to change the commonly held conceptions regarding the unidimensional – positive – nature of cooperation. It will help create a comprehensive understanding of cooperation and, specifically, when it should be encouraged or, alternatively, monitored.

1 500 000 €

Start date: 2015-09-01, End date: 2020-08-31

At the heart of the multi-faceted enterprise of formal semantics lies a simple yet powerful conception of meaning based on truth-conditions: one understands a sentence if one knows under which circumstances the sentence is true. This notion has been extremely fruitful resulting in a wealth of practical applications. But to what extent can it also account for the human linguistic behavior? The past decade has seen the increasing interaction between cognitive science and formal semantics, and the emergence of the new field of experimental semantics. One of its main challenges is the traditional normative take on meaning, which makes semantic theories hard to compare with experimental data. The aim of this project is to advance experimental semantics by building cognitive semantics, that is semantics founded on cognitive representations instead of normative logical abstractions. Numerical information plays a central role in communication. We talk about the number of students in a class, or the proportion of votes for a particular political party. In this project, I will focus on the linguistic expressions of quantities, known as quantifiers. Recent progress in the study of computational constraints on quantifier processing in natural language laid the groundwork for extending semantic theory with cognitive aspects. In parallel, cognitive science has furthered the study of non-linguistic quantity representations. This project will integrate formal models of quantifier semantics with cognitive quantity representations in order to obtain cognitive semantics of quantifiers, which is both logically precise and psychologically plausible. The theory will have significant repercussions, not only in the immediately related disciplines as semantics and psycholinguistics, but also beyond, e.g., in philosophy and in language technology.

1 457 063 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

"This project aims to ""crack"" the emotional code of music, i.e. to provide, for the first time, a precise characterization of what type of music signal is able to activate one emotion or another. Research into this problem so far has been mainly correlating indistinct emotional reactions to uncontrolled musical stimuli, with much technical sophistication but to little avail. Project CREAM builds on the PI's unique bi-disciplinary career spanning both computer science and cognitive neuroscience, to propose a radically novel approach: instead of using audio signal processing to simply observe musical stimuli a posteriori, we will harvest a series of recent developments in the field to build powerful new tools of experimental control, able to engineer musical stimuli that can activate specific emotional pathways (e.g. music manipulated to sound like expressive speech, or to sound like survival-relevant environmental sounds). By combining this creative use of new technologies with a well-concerted mix of methods from experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience (incl. psychoacoustics, fNIRS brain imaging, EEG/ERP paradigms, intercultural studies, infant studies), project CREAM will yield the first functional description of the neural and cognitive processes involved in the induction of emotions by music, and establish new avenues for interdisciplinary research between the life sciences and the information sciences. But most spectacularly, the fundamental breakthroughs brought by project CREAM will unlatch the therapeutic potential of musical emotions. Music will become a cognitive technology, with algorithms able to ""engineer"" it to mobilize one neuronal pathway or another, non-intrusively and non-pharmacologically. Within the proposed 5-year plan, support from the ERC will allow to implement a series of high-impact clinical studies with are direct applications of our findings, e.g. for the linguistic rehabilitation of aphasic stroke victims."

1 499 992 €

Start date: 2014-10-01, End date: 2019-09-30

How did three soldiers override their initial freezing response to overpower an armed terrorist in the Thalys-train to Paris in 2015? This question is relevant for anyone aiming to optimize approach-avoidance (AA) decisions during threat. It is particularly relevant for patients with anxiety disorders whose persistent avoidance is key to the maintenance of their anxiety. Computational psychiatry has made great progress in formalizing how we make (mal)adaptive decisions. Current models, however, largely ignore the transient psychophysiological state of the decision maker. Parasympathetic state and flexibility in switching between para- and sympathetic states are directly related to freezing, and are known to bias AA-decisions toward avoidance. The central aim of this research program is to forge a mechanistic understanding of how we compute AA-decisions on the basis of those psychophysiological states, and to identify alterations in anxiety patients in order to guide new personalized neurocognitive interventions into their persistent avoidance. I will develop a neurocomputational model of AA-decisions that accounts for transient psychophysiological states, in order to define which decision parameters are altered in active and passive avoidance in anxiety. I will test causal premises of the model using state-of-the-art techniques, including pharmacological and electrophysiological interventions. Based on these insights I will for the first time apply personalized brain stimulation to anxiety patients. Clinically, this project should open the way to effective intervention with fearful avoidance in anxiety disorders that rank among the most common, costly and persistent mental disorders. Theoretically, conceptualizing transient psychophysiological states as causal factor in AA-decision models is essential to understanding passive and active avoidance. Optimizing AA-decisions also holds broad societal relevance given currently increased fearful avoidance of outgroups.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2019-01-01, End date: 2023-12-31

The switch from parchment to paper had a fundamental impact on later medieval universities, equivalent to the shift to Open Access today, hindering some intellectual practices while encouraging others. The DEBATE project identifies a neglected genre of latin texts that flourished on paper, the Principia, which record the public confrontations between candidates (socii) for the title of doctor. These debates, imposed by university statutes throughout Europe as annual exercises linked to lectures on the Sentences (the medieval parallel to our PhD thesis), forced the candidate to reveal his innovative theories (sheets of papers were exchanged among the socii beforehand), display his erudition and prove his intellectual prowess before a large audience. The futuristic discussion usually exceeded the confines of one discipline and allowed the bachelor to indulge his interdisciplinary interests, employing science, theology, mathematics, politics, literature, and rhetoric in his polemics against his colleagues. Principia thus reveal the cutting edge method of fostering science in later medieval universities. The DEBATE team intends to identify new manuscripts, edit the texts, establish authorship for anonymous fragments and propose an interpretation that will help explain how innovation was a primordial target in medieval academia. Putting together all the surviving texts of Principia produced in various cultural contexts, this project will provide a wealth of material that will bring about a basic change in our understanding of the mechanism of the production of academic knowledge in the early universities all around Europe.The project is designed to promote erudition by combining a palaeographical, codicological, editorial and hermeneutical approach, aiming to open an advanced area of inquiry focusing on an intellectual practice that bound together medieval universities from different geographical and cultural regions: Paris, Bologna, Vienna, Prague, Krakow and Cologne.

1 997 976 €

Start date: 2018-08-01, End date: 2023-07-31

The desert is a paradox: it is at the same time arid and rich in resources, a margin and an interface. Far from being a no man’s land, it is a social space of linked solidarities. The “Desert Networks” project aims to explore the reticular organisation of such a zone by focusing on the southern part of the Eastern Desert of Egypt. Located between the Nile and the Red Sea, it has always been a tantalizing region for Egypt and beyond. Its ancient remains are admirably preserved and ancient sources about and from the region itself are numerous. Yet, the history of its occupation and appropriation remains a static and compartmentalized one. Therefore, the ambition of the project is to cross disciplinary borders and achieve an epistemological break by working for the first time in and on the Eastern desert as a dynamic object, both from a long-term perspective (mid-second millennium BC - late third century AD), and by analysing the patterns and functions of the different networks that linked its various nodes using the connectivity theory that reshaped scholarly paradigms for the Mediterranean in the 2000s. As the head of the French Eastern Desert mission, the PI will co-ordinate a multidisciplinary team. For the first time, the project will gather all the data unearthed in the region over 300 years, as well as the expected data from the excavations conducted by the project, in a database linked with a GIS. A collaborative and online open access map of the Eastern Desert will be created and will serve for the spatial analyses and rendering of the real, economic and social networks in the area. These networks evolved over time and through a shifting geography, as people experienced different perceptions of space. By assessing all these facets and confronting the archaeological material and written evidence, our final objective is to write a new history of the Eastern Desert from Pharaonic to Roman times, focusing on its networks and evaluating their meaning.

1 499 844 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

The goal of this research initiative is to construct large-scale computational modeling of how knowledge of the world emerges from the combination of innate mechanisms and visual experience. The ultimate goal is a ‘digital baby’ model which, through perception and interaction with the world, develops on its own representations of complex concepts that allow it to understand the world around it, in terms of objects, object categories, events, agents, actions, goals, social interactions, etc. A wealth of empirical research in the cognitive sciences have studied how natural concepts in these domains are acquired spontaneously and efficiently from perceptual experience, but a major open challenge is an understating of the processes and computations involved by rigorous testable models. To deal with this challenge we propose a novel methodology based on two components. The first, ‘computational Nativism’, is a computational theory of cognitively and biologically plausible innate structures , which guide the system along specific paths through its acquisition of knowledge, to continuously acquire meaningful concepts, which can be significant to the observer, but statistically inconspicuous in the sensory input. The second, ‘embedded interpretation’ is a new way of acquiring extended learning and interpretation processes. This is obtained by placing perceptual inference mechanisms within a broader perception-action loop, where the actions in the loop are not overt actions, but internal operation over internal representation. The results will provide new modeling and understanding of the age-old problem of how innate mechanisms and perception are combined in human cognition, and may lay foundation for a major research direction dealing with computational cognitive development.

1 647 175 €

Start date: 2011-06-01, End date: 2016-05-31

Every year a brain stroke will impair approximately 2 million Europeans. Notwithstanding recent progress, many of these individuals will have persistent cognitive deficits, impacting their personality, degrading their quality of life and preventing their return to work. Early identification of anatomical predictors of brain recovery may significantly reduce the burden of these deficits on patients, their families and wider society, while also leading to the discovery of new targets for treatments. I have pioneered the development of imaging techniques that allow for the exploration of the relationship between brain disconnection and neuropsychological syndromes. With these tools, I aim to demonstrate that the structural organisation of the human brain's connections is the common denominator supporting functional specialisation and, when damaged, neuropsychological disorders. Building on my expertise, I plan to (1) establish an atlas mapping the function of white matter for the entire human brain, (2) fractionate the stroke population according to disconnection profiles, (3) predict neuropsychological symptoms based on disconnection profiles, and (4) characterise and manipulate the fine biology involved in the disconnection recovery.In so doing, this project will introduce a paradigm shift in the relationship between brain structure, function and behavioural/cognitive disorders. I will deliver a comprehensive biological model of the neurocircuitry that supports neuropsychological syndromes, which will gather the modular organisation of primary idiotypic functions with the integrative organisation of highly associative levels of functions. In the long term, this project will allow me to determine if measures of brain ‘connectivity’ can be translated into advanced standard procedures that provide for a more personalised medicine, that focuses upon rehabilitation and improving the prediction of symptom recovery, while providing new targets for pharmacological treatment.

1 999 201 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

Apathy is a prominent and severely debilitating aspect of several psychiatric disorders, most notably schizophrenia. Little is known regarding the neuroscientific basis of apathy, however. Clinically, it has been suggested that two forms of apathy can be distinguished: cognitive apathy (CA) which concerns reduced initiative to start daily activities and social-emotional apathy (SEA) which concerns reduced interest in otherwise gratifying activities. I hypothesize that CA is primarily a dysfunction of cognitive control and self-initiated action, whereas SEA is primarily a failure to signal the salience of positive events. The present project, for the first time, tests the hypothesis that two neuroanatomically distinct routes underlie these two forms of apathy: a dorsal frontostriatal circuit including also the right parietal cortex for CA (associated with abnormalities of glutamate neurotransmission), and a more ventral frontostriatal circuit including the reward system for SEA (involving abnormal dopamine transmission). The objective of this project is threefold. First, to investigate the two neural circuits in relation to the two forms of apathy using functional MRI and positron emission tomography. Second, I will test the hypothesis that CA is associated with poorer long-term functioning using longitudinal data. Third, we will conduct a controlled treatment study of a novel intervention to improve CA: transcranial magnetic stimulation over the right prefrontal cortex to target the relevant network. Thus, the present proposal aims to elucidate fundamental cognitive and emotional processes underlying apathy by unravelling the neural basis of two pathways that may lead to apathy. Last but not least, the treatment study may contribute to novel strategies that will ultimately improve patients’ lives. The results will also have implications for understanding apathy in patients with depression, brain damage and neurodegenerative diseases.

1 499 780 €

Start date: 2013-04-01, End date: 2018-03-31

Our ability to communicate using language in conversation is considered the hallmark of human intelligence. Yet, while holding a dialogue is effortless for most of us, modelling this basic human skill by computational means has proven extremely difficult. In DREAM, I address this challenge by establishing a new computational model of a dialogue agent that can learn to take part in conversation directly from data about language use. DREAM stands at the crossroads of the symbolic and the sub-symbolic traditions regarding the nature of human cognitive processing and, by extension, its computational modelling. My model is grounded in linguistic theories of dialogue, rooted in the symbolic tradition, but exploits recent advances in computational learning that allow the agent to learn the representations that it manipulates, which are distributed and sub-symbolic, directly from experience. This is an original approach that constitutes a paradigm shift in dialogue modelling --- from predefined symbolic representations to automatic representation learning --- that will break new scientific ground in Computational Linguistics, Linguistics, and Artificial Intelligence. The DREAM agent will be implemented as an artificial neural network system and trained with task-oriented conversations where the participants have a well-defined end goal. The agent will be able to integrate linguistic and perceptual information and will be endowed with the capability to dynamically track both speaker commitments and partner-specific conventions, leading to more human-like and effective communication. Besides providing a breakthrough in our capacity to build sophisticated conversational agents, DREAM will have substantial impact on our scientific understanding of human language use, thanks to its emphasis on theory-driven hypotheses and model analysis.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2019-09-01, End date: 2024-08-31

Chronology is fundamental to all study of the past. Social and cultural change is incomprehensible without clear information on the ordering and duration of events. However, the exact chronology of the Old World only extends as far back as the mid-1st millennium BC, even though state-level societies in both the Western and the Eastern Hemispheres emerged several millennia before this time. In the New World, the situation is even worse, with none of the pre-Columbian societies currently fixed in calendrical time. No scientific method has so far been able to provide historians of early society with the levels of precision considered essential by their modern counterparts. Indeed, if the 20th century AD were dated at the same resolution as the 20th century BC, the two World Wars would be indistinguishable in time; and the Montgomery Bus Strike might post-date the release of Mandela. ECHOES pioneers the first technique capable of providing ancient history with the same clarity as modern history. The new approach is based on past solar events that initiated sudden increases in the atmospheric concentration of radiocarbon. The enriched concentrations would have been absorbed by all growing plants at the time. Crucially, fossil wood archives already exist in which the growth year of each tree-ring is exactly known, enabling the events to be easily dated. Moreover, the uplifts will also be present in all artefacts that were fashioned from contemporary plant material, such as papyrus documents. Matching the enrichments in such cultural items with the tree-ring archives will also date them to the exact year. ECHOES aims to produce a myriad of such connections to secure key early societies in calendrical time. This will lay the foundations for a globally synchronous, chronological lattice that will allow the flow of technology and ideas to be understood in a way that has never before been previously possible, as each cultural record will be fixed to the same time frame.

1 494 041 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

In everyday life, people frequently engage in bodily activities to regulate their emotions, such as physical exercise to reduce stress, eating tasty foods to improve one's mood, or practice meditation to achieve deep states of relaxation. In spite of such widespread practices, the wisdom of using the body in emotion regulation is highly contested within psychological science. Some studies have shown that people may successfully control their emotions through bodily exercies such as muscle relaxation or controlled breathing. However, other studies have shown that controlling bodily expressions in emotion regulation is ineffective, cognitively draining, and potentially damaging to one's psychological health. As such, it remains unclear if, when, or why using the body in emotion regulation may be helpful or hurtful. In the proposed research, I propose a new and integrative theoretical approach to the role of the body in emotion regulation. Drawing from modern theories of embodied cognition, I advance a model of EMBodied Emotion Regulation (EMBER). This model assumes that embodied (sensori-motor) processes are likely to exert a pervasive influence on all forms of emotion regulation, even those that are targeted at cognitive systems such as attention or appraisals. From this perspective, recruiting appropriate embodiments may considerably enhance the effectiveness and efficiency of emotion regulation, while neglecting or interfering with embodiments may set people up for emotion-regulatory failure. Key hypotheses of the EMBER model will be tested in four projects, which address potential synergetic effects between embodiments and emotion regulation strategies (Project 1), how embodiments may enhance the efficiency of implementing and learning emotion-regulatory skills (Project 2), how ineffective emotion regulation strategies may lead to interference or neglect of emotion embodiments (Project 3), and the potential therapeutic role of the embodied exchanges between patient and therapist in psychotherapy (Project 4).

1 487 027 €

Start date: 2012-04-01, End date: 2018-03-31

The pioneering enterprise I propose is the study of a particular type of linguistic discontinuity – language revival – inspired by the revival of Hebrew at the end of the 19th century. The historical and sociocultural dimensions the revival have been studied before, but not its linguistic dimensions. My main aim is to construct a model of the linguistic factors which have shaped the revival of Hebrew. I expect this model to provide clues for the understanding of the process of language revival in general. For a language to be revived, a new grammar must be created by its native speakers. I hypothesize that the new grammar is formed by some of the general principles which also govern other better known cases of linguistic discontinuity (creoles, mixed languages, emergent sign languages etc.). The model I will develop will lay the foundation for a new subfield within the study of discontinuity – the study of language revival. I will start with careful work of documenting the development of the grammar of Modern Hebrew, in particular its syntax, something which has not been done systematically before. One product of the project will be a linguistic application for the documentation and annotation of the novel syntactic constructions of Modern Hebrew, their sources in previous stages of Hebrew and in the languages with which Modern Hebrew was in contact at the time of the revival, and the development of these constructions since the beginning of the revival until the present time. The linguistic application will be made available on the web for other linguists to use and to contribute to. The institution of an expanding data-base of the syntactic innovations of Modern Hebrew which comprises both documentation/ annotation and theoretical modeling which could be applied to other languages makes this an extremely ambitious proposal with potentially wide-reaching ramifications for the revival and revitalization of the languages of ethno-linguistic minorities world wide.

2 498 750 €

Start date: 2017-10-01, End date: 2022-09-30

The central aims of this project are to establish the shapes of the various urban hierarchies existing in the provinces of the Roman empire and (especially) to use the quantitative properties of these hierarchies to shed new light on levels of economic integration. Should we conceptualize the urban system of the Roman world as a collection of cellular ‘modules’ which were only loosely connected by the imposition of a rudimentary administrative superstructure and by resource flows of limited significance? Or did the creation of an overarching empire favour the emergence of an economically well-integrated urban network or at least the growth of certain ‘nodal points’ which helped to tie the empire together by mediating resource flows between regions? Key topics to be explored include the physical size of cities, the overall shape of regional urban hierarchies, the role of harbour cities in connecting various parts of the empire, and the economic implications of the emergence and existence of large provincial capitals and other ‘primate cities’. Building on spatial and economic theories from various disciplines, the project starts from the working hypothesis that the urban system of the Roman empire possessed a number of unique features which set it apart from that of the various urban system existing in the same geographical area during the early-modern period. While some of these features (such as the size of Rome) can plausibly be attributed to the fact that the Roman empire was much larger than the empires and emerging nation states of early-modern times, the project aims to demonstrate that the specific configuration of regional urban hierarchies in the Roman world also reflects levels of economic integration which fell dramatically short of those achieved in various parts of early-modern Europe.

2 496 560 €

Start date: 2013-06-01, End date: 2018-05-31

Given my current state of knowledge, and a desirable state of knowledge, how do I get from one to the other? It is possible in principle to reach the desirable state of knowledge, i.e., does it make sense at all to start trying to obtain the desirable state? If I know it is impossible to obtain, there is no use trying. But even if I know that it is possible in principle, is there a way to approach the desirable state in steps or phases, i.e., can I iteratively construct an epistemic protocol to achieve the desirable state? And can this be done with some or with full assurance that I am getting closer to the goal? Such problems become more complex if they involve more agents. The knowledge states of agents may be in terms of knowledge properties of other agents. Such assumed knowledge properties may be incorrect, or the agents may act at unpredictable or unknown moments, or with delayed or faulty communication channels, as typically in asynchronous systems. The focus of much research in dynamic epistemic logic, and more generally in epistemic and temporal modal logics, is analysis: given a well-specified input epistemic state, and some well-specified dynamic process, compute the output epistemic state. In this proposal we focus on synthesis: given a well-specified input epistemic state, and desirable output (typically less well specified), find the process transforming the input into the output. The process found is the epistemic protocol. We will be aided by recent advances in logics for propositional quantification. Areas of specific interest are protocols for secure communication, protocol languages, and agency. Our project goal is epistemic protocol synthesis for synchronous and asynchronous multi-agent systems, by way of using and developing dynamic epistemic logics.

951 400 €

Start date: 2013-02-01, End date: 2018-01-31

"Alignment and argument structure lies at the heart of all current theoretical models in linguistics, both syntactic models and research within typology. In spite of that, no large-scale comprehensive study of the historical development of case marking and argument structure has been carried out in modern times, using modern linguistic approaches and frameworks, and covering an entire language family from its first documentation until modern times. The project EVALISA aims to investigate case marking and argument structure from a historical perspective, or more precisely non-nominative case marking of subjects, focusing on its development through the history of the Indo-European languages. One of the products emerging from the project is an electronically searchable database of predicates taking non-nominative subject marking, available to the research community at large, for further research on the topic. Another product is a typology of grammaticalization paths of non-nominative case marking of subjects. This is a timely enterprise given that non-nominative subject marking is extremely common in the languages of world. A third product is a methodology for reconstructing syntax and grammar, based on the tools of Construction Grammar. The theoretical framework of Construction Grammar is easily extendible to syntactic reconstruction, due to the basic status of form–meaning pairings in that model, and hence the more lexicon-like status of the grammar. This creates a natural leap for Construction Grammar from synchronic form–meaning pairings to historical reconstruction, based on form–meaning pairings. This methodology is of importance for scholars within anthropological linguistics, working on the history of oral or less-documented languages."

1 498 744 €

Start date: 2013-10-01, End date: 2018-09-30

Expectations about health and disease induce immune and endocrine responses and directly affect health and treatment outcomes. However, there is an urge to understand the mechanical underpinnings how expectations affect immune and endocrine responses and how this knowledge can be used for therapeutic interventions. My research group studies the main expectancy learning mechanisms for itch and pain as a generic expectancy model across symptoms and conditions. We recently showed that dual expectancy learning processes (i.e. conditioning and suggestions) are most powerful for itch symptoms, corresponding with findings for other symptoms and conditions. Based on these studies, I propose a groundbreaking dual expectancy learning approach, testing whether combined expectancy learning processes (i.e. both conditioning and suggestions, offered with personalized cues and exposure to relevant stressors) affect most profoundly the immune and endocrine system, in turn affecting health and disease outcomes. The major aim is to unravel the central mechanisms of how peoples’ expectations affect immune and endocrine responses and related health outcomes, through the use of pioneering multidisciplinary methods in healthy and clinical populations. First, we systematically train immune and endocrine responses and relate them to psychological, neurobiological and genetic mechanisms. Second, we test these manipulations for physical health challenges (e.g. inflammatory or allergic histamine reactions) in healthy subjects and patients. Third, we study the long-term effects in chronic inflammatory itch and pain conditions (e.g. replacing anti-inflammatory pharmacotherapies, reducing side effects). This interdisciplinary, cross-boundary project progresses key theoretical knowledge of the central expectation mechanisms for immune and endocrine responses. Findings open new horizons for health prevention and therapeutic interventions for various inflammatory conditions and physical symptoms.

1 981 009 €

Start date: 2014-09-01, End date: 2019-08-31

We are visual animals. Seeing is our prime means for probing the outside world. Although vision appears effortless, we dedicate about a quarter of our most precious organ to this most prominent of all senses. The primary objective of this research programme is to develop a rigorous new view on how the human brain process visual information. This endeavour is based on two concepts: the methodological issue of necessity and the theoretical framework of cortical networks. In the last decades, electrophysiological and neuroimaging studies have identified more than 40 separate maps in the brain that are selectively tuned to specific visual features, such colour or motion. Brain-behaviour relationships inferred from electrophysiology and functional neuroimaging are per definition correlational. We need neuropsychological research with patients who suffered focal brain damage to show us which brain structures are necessary. Only structures that, when damaged, have a selective detrimental effect on the execution of that function are necessary. Other structures that are activated during the execution of that function are merely involved in associated processes. Having established which brain structures are necessary for a specific function, the proposed research programme will investigate how these necessary maps are linked together. As a theoretical perspective, this programme adopts a critical position towards the “what and where pathways” model of Goodale & Milner, the current gold standard. The model postulates two major pathways, each involving a large number of maps; one for processing visuospatial information for motor programming, and one for visual recognition and memory. I have recently suggested an alternative model in which the maps are thought to be organised in multiple overlapping networks. This research programme entails dedicated imaging experiments and a large-scale, neuropsychological study involving four academic medical centres in the Netherlands.

2 499 139 €

Start date: 2014-07-01, End date: 2020-06-30

Fathers have largely been neglected in parenting research -- although they constitute about 50% of parents. The aim of the proposed project is to test the hypothesis that fathers’ parenting is under hormonal control and can be changed by behavioral and hormonal interventions. I propose a series of randomized controlled trials (RCT) focusing on a critical phase of parenthood: the transition to having the first baby. I will test whether experiments that modulate oxytocin and testosterone levels enhance fathers’ neural processing of infant signals and of threats to the infant and stimulate fathers’ parenting quality and involvement in parenting. Drawing firm conclusions about the neural and hormonal basis of human parenting is critically dependent on RCTs. I propose two types of experiments: (1) within-subject trials, using nasal administration of oxytocin, testosterone, and a placebo, and (2) between-subject trials, using behavioral interventions aimed at promoting sensitive parenting and physical contact. The behavioral interventions include prenatal and postnatal video feedback intervention (in the prenatal phase based on ultrasound scans) and the use of soft baby carriers. Both types of trials take place 3 months before the infant’s birth, and 2 and 7 months afterwards. A special focus lies on the aspect of protection: a dimension of parenting that has received considerable attention in animal research but, despite its evolutionary importance, not in studies on humans. Testing the efficacy of the behavioral experiments in boosting fathers’ protective parenting and participation in caregiving activities has clear practical significance (for fathers, mothers, children, and society). At the same time, examining the hormonal and neural mechanisms is crucial for the development of theory on the interplay between neuroscience and parenting.

2 460 500 €

Start date: 2016-01-01, End date: 2020-12-31

How did free agents (entrepreneurs operating outside of the state-sponsored monopolies) in Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire react to the creation of colonial monopolies (royal monopolies and chartered companies) by centralized states between 1500 and 1750? This question will be answered by looking at the role individuals played in the construction of informal empires, defined as a multitude of self-organized networks operating world-wide, whose main goal was safeguarding personal advantages and maximizing profits, in spite of state intervention. Self-organized networks of free agents fought royal monopolies held by the Ottoman Sultans, the Iberian and French Kings and the Dutch, English, Swedish and Danish chartered companies. Free agents, their families and networks operated, in the Atlantic and/or Asia, across geographical borders between empires, went beyond the restrictions imposed by religious differences, ethnicity, defying the interests of the central states in Europe and Asia, questioning loyalties and redefining identities. This informal empire brought to fruition by the individual choices of free agents and their networks as a reaction to the State imposed monopolies was, I hypothesize, a borderless, self-organized, often cross-cultural, multi-ethnic, pluri-national and stateless world. My approach is innovative in that it employs a theoretical grid for the analysis of the instances in which Early Modern monopolies were challenged, mediated, co-opted or simply hijacked by free agents. My model delineates actions and re-actions such as illegal activities, cooperative strategies or extensive collaboration between networks and the central states. Based on the unique comparison between Western Europe and the Ottoman Empire, as well as in the analyses of the Atlantic and Asian expansions of European powers, my proposal will pioneer a new approach to the comparative history of empires during the Early Modern period.

1 499 933 €

Start date: 2013-01-01, End date: 2017-12-31

In television series like CSI and Criminal Minds forensic scientists can solve even the trickiest cases within a few hours. Technologies such as blood-spatter analysis, DNA and autopsies aid in reconstructing the crime and psychiatric classifications like ‘psychopath’ help to identify the perpetrator. Science and technology’s impartial and unambiguous results seem to ensure that justice is done equally for everyone. In reality, however, the role and impact of forensic science depend on where the court is located. Scholars have attributed this regional variance to either the availability of technology or the different legal systems. These explanations have not been backed up by empirical or comparative research and do not sufficiently explain why scientific experts are powerful in some national courtrooms, but dismissed in others. Moreover, they neglect a third, vital factor: culture. This project will demonstrate the cultural influences that determine how forensic science was accepted in Europe (1930-2000) by focusing on historically and nationally variable political ideology, media representations and norms on gender and sexuality. The project’s hypothesis is that cultural ideas and practices have been major determinants in the position of science in the courtroom. To test this, I will use criminal cases in which gender plays an important role: rape, murder and infanticide. Because these often play out in the media as well as the courtroom, they can best unveil the power of culture. The forensic practices of four countries with differing legal systems and ideologies will be compared (the Netherlands, England, Spain and Russia). FORCe will analyse the entangled relationships between forensic science, medicine and psychiatry, using an innovative comparative cultural-historical approach. The results will explain how scientific expertise works in practice and impacts the administration of justice.

2 000 000 €

Start date: 2018-09-01, End date: 2023-08-31

The role of children's behavior and temperament is increasingly acknowledged in family research. Gene-environment Correlation (rGE) processes may account for some child effects, as parents react to children s behavior which is in part genetically influenced (evocative rGE). In addition, passive rGE, in which parenting and children s behavior are correlated through overlapping genetic influences on family members behavior may account in part for the parenting-child behavior relationships. The proposed project will be the first one to directly address these issues with DNA information on family members and quality observational data on parent and child behaviors, following children through early development. Two separate longitudinal studies will investigate the paths from children s genes to their behavior, to the way parents react and modify their parenting towards the child, affecting child development: Study 1 will follow first-time parents from pregnancy through children s early childhood, decoupling parent effect and child effects. Study 2 will follow dizygotic twins and their parents through middle childhood, capitalizing on genetic differences between twins reared by the same parents. We will test the hypothesis that parents' characteristics, such as parenting style and parental attitudes, are associated with children's genetic tendencies. Both parenting and child behaviors will be monitored consecutively, to investigate the co-development of parents and children in an evocative rGE process. Child and parent candidate genes relevant to social behavior, notably those from the dompaminergic and serotonergic systems, will be linked to parents behaviors. Pilot results show children s genes predict parenting, and an important task for the study will be to identify mediators of this effect, such as children s temperament. We will lay the ground for further research into the complexity of gene-environment correlations as children and parents co-develop.

1 443 687 €

Start date: 2010-01-01, End date: 2015-12-31

Depression and anxiety are the most frequently diagnosed mental health problems, leading to devastating long-term outcomes that affect a huge proportion of adolescents across the globe. Effective prevention programs are urgently needed; however, even our most advanced programs often lead to disappointing outcomes. Video games promise a groundbreaking, 21st century innovation: games provide learning environments that keep youth motivated and engaged to practice emotional resiliency skills that help prevent anxiety and depression. The education and medical fields have begun to harness the immense potential of games to teach new forms of thought and behaviour. Yet validated games for mental health are virtually nonexistent. The proposed program of research will: (a) Develop genre-breaking games which integrate biofeedback and evidence-based game mechanics that target anxiety and depression; (b) Test whether these games are more effective at reducing anxiety and depressive symptoms than the best conventional evidence-based prevention programs; and (c) Apply a novel, game-based methodology, to pinpoint the precise game mechanics responsible for training emotional resilience. With the multidisciplinary network of scientists and game designers that I lead – and a wide array of research designs, multi-method assessments and analytic techniques – this program of research promises to be the first of its kind. Results will establish the precise game mechanics that can successfully change causal factors that maintain anxiety and depression and provide a validated toolbox for efficient development of future applied games for a range of mental health concerns. These game-based engines for behavioural and emotional change will be mobilized through massive distribution channels (schools, social media), potentially making an unprecedented impact on the next generation’s prevalence rates of anxiety and depression.

1 999 510 €

Start date: 2016-08-01, End date: 2021-07-31

Most of language functions are under the left brain control in both left- and right-handers and involve structural asymmetries between the two hemispheres. While this asymmetry was considered as associated with handedness, such a relation has been recently questioned. Considering the strong language/gesture links in humans and the continuities between the gestural system in apes and monkeys and some language properties, we recently suggested the hypothesis of a continuity between language lateralization and asymmetry of communicative gestures in both human and nonhuman primates. Given the phylogenetical proximity between those species, comparative research on brain specialization between a non-linguistic gestural system (i.e., in monkeys) versus a linguistic gestural systems in humans (i.e., sign language in deaf) might help evaluating the gestural continuities with language lateralization in term of manual asymmetries, structural and functional lateralization of the brain. To this purpose, a first objective is to evaluate the continuities of manual and brain asymmetries between (1) a linguistic gestural system in humans using MRI in 100 adult native deaf French signers, and (2) a non-linguistic gestural system of adult baboons Papio anubis using 106 MRI brain images. A second objective is to explore the functional brain lateralization of gestures production in baboons (versus manipulation) using non-invasive wireless Infrared Spectroscopy in 8 trained subjects within interactions with humans. A last innovative objective is to investigate, through the first non-invasive longitudinal MRI study conducted from birth to sexual maturity in primates, the development and heritability of brain structural asymmetries and their correlates with gesture asymmetries in 30 baboons. At both evolutionary and developmental levels, the project will thus ultimately contribute to enhance our understanding on the role of gestures in the origins of brain specialization for language.

1 499 192 €

Start date: 2017-09-01, End date: 2022-08-31

Mental disorders put a great burden on society and their impact on personal life can be devastating. Most mental disorders begin in childhood or adolescence and co-occur with somatic disease. In children, the most common problems are ADHD and anxious/depression and these problems often co-occur with additional behavioral and emotional problems. In adults, depression is the major mental disorder. It frequently co-occurs with anxiety disorders, substance abuse, migraine, cardiovascular disease and its associated risk factors. Indeed, depression is the largest cause of nonfatal disease burden in Western countries and increasingly in low and middle income countries worldwide as well. This application focuses on the genetics of common mental disorders, co-morbid traits and diseases across the lifespan. Its primary aim is the discovery of developmental paths into risk of depression and co-morbid disorders, using genetic epidemiological, molecular genetic and gene-environment interaction models. The introduction of multivariate and longitudinal models, in particular methods introduced by my group, into these areas will lead to substantial increases in power to unravel the contributions of genotype, environment and their interactions. The project described in this application addresses three interrelated topics: 1. Neuropsychiatric disorders and cognition 2. Depression, anxiety, substance use, abuse and dependence 3. Depression, migraine and cardiovascular risk As a connecting methodological framework it will develop models for the genetic analysis of these complex traits, especially gene-environment interaction and genome-wide association models. My ambition is to discover which genes influence the risk for mental disorder and co-morbid biomedical traits, to identify the causal variants, and to explore their interaction with environmental risk factors.

2 466 923 €

Start date: 2009-02-01, End date: 2013-10-31

Plant foods comprise the majority of most human diets, yet the potential importance of these foods in human evolution is often overlooked. Using a behavioral ecology framework, the HARVEST project explores fundamental questions: Why did hominins choose to eat certain plants? What were their foraging goals? We will focus on two objectives: 1) Reconstructing the diets of fossil hominins and 2) Exploring the costs and benefits of plant foods. To understand the factors driving food choice by ancient hominins, we must know what they ate. Analyses of plant remains, proteins, DNA and other residues preserved in dental calculus are cutting-edge methods for reconstructing diets, and provide information about food, processing techniques, and oral microbiota. With a sequential sampling approach, we will combine these analyses to identify foods consumed by hominin groups for which plants are thought to be of great importance. The decision to consume a particular plant depends on its inherent properties (nutrients and antifeedants) and on the biological and technological abilities of the consumer, so that each potential food has a different cost and benefit. We will study the variation in plant properties among microhabitats in African environments similar to those used by hominins, to better model their food choices. Separately, our study of the food choices among living African foraging and farming groups will reveal if plants are chosen for calories, micronutrients or cultural preferences, while analysis of their gut microbiota and studies of their food processing behaviors will indicate how they acquire nutrients from these foods. Finally, we will assess how the costs of fire might influence food processing choices. Results from these studies will help fill important lacunae in our understanding of hominin diets, broaden our knowledge of hominin behaviors in a variety of environments, and help generate hypotheses about the relationships between diet and human evolution.

1 499 950 €

Start date: 2017-02-01, End date: 2022-01-31

Medieval public health is mired in modern myth: without centralized governments, democratic values and advanced medicine, promoting health at the population level was purportedly either unthinkable or simply impractical. Offering a radically different view, HealthScaping will document, analyze and disseminate knowledge about preventative public healthcare between 1200-1500, an era of accelerated urbanization followed by massive demographic decline, with the onset of Black Death (1347-51). This long-term and comparative perspective will fundamentally revise the narrative of European public health by tracing the development and impact of pertinent government policies, medical discourses and social and religious action in the continent’s two most urbanized and richly documented regions, Italy and the Low Countries. The project taps numerous written, material and visual sources and archaeological data from several sites, and examines them also by critically engaging the insights of governmentality studies, cultural-spatial analysis and actor-network theory. A multidisciplinary team, working in a Geographical Information Systems environment and generating innovative urban health maps, will recover earlier societies’ struggles with domestic and industrial waste, travel and labor hazards, food quality, and social and religious behaviors considered harmful or dangerous. As such, the project’s implications will be broad and profound, for it will 1) dislodge bio-power from its accustomed place in modernity; 2) historicize the concept of the public sphere from a health perspective; and 3) challenge the privileged role given to epidemic disease as a catalyst for environmental interventions in premodernity. It will also 4) generate new insights for public health scholars and practitioners working today around the globe, by rethinking the feasibility of preventative interventions under highly diverse forms of government, culture and topography.

1 998 004 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31

The scientific research project submitted to the ERC intends to examine the creation of the French political science lexicon from a linguistic point of view. Most of the Political science vocabulary that the French language uses today comes from the translations from Latin and Greek into French during the 14th and 15th centuries. Historians and philosophers have noticed that the 14th century is an essential period for neologisms in the political science field. But no scientific research has been yet conducted to prove it, especially because of the lack of modern editions of the texts. The scientific project submitted to the ERC can be developed in three parts during the next 5 academic years: 1/ an edition of a major political science masterpiece in Middle French from the 14th century that has never been published before (years 1 to 5) : The City of God written by Augustine and translated by Raoul de Presles. The modern edition of the first translation of the City of God will allow researchers to have an easy access to primary sources in order to lead new research in linguistics, history, political sciences, and more generally in Humanities. 2/ a publication of a scientific monograph on the French political science lexicon (year 4). Indeed, such a scientific monograph will give a panoramic overview of the French Political Science Lexicon and will allow researchers to better understand the history of French concepts in Humanities. 3/ a publication of a Dictionary of Political Science (year 5). Finally, a dictionary in historical political science will facilitate our knowledge of the evolution of words in that particular field, from the Middle Ages to the 21st century.

600 945 €

Start date: 2008-10-01, End date: 2013-09-30

Historians have good reasons to be highly suspicious of the “rational choice” methodologies that hold sway in economics, political science or sociology and that find a new lease on life today with the rise of the cognitive sciences. On the other hand, researchers using these methodologies show usually very little interest in history. The result is that we know very little about the historical development of “rational choice” as a way to define rationality in action, while this intellectual paradigm has become pervasive and reshaped the way we do science and the way we think about politics. This project will follow the problem of decision-making through the 20th century and weave into a single historical narrative its different disciplinary formulations. It starts with a puzzle: while the “decisionist” critiques of legality of the 1920s associated the decision with an anti-rationalist vision of politics, this notion gradually morphed into the epitome of “rational choice” after 1945. How did this transformation occur? The project will reconstruct this shift from a paradigm in which Law was the instrument that would make political decisions rational, to another in which the power of rationalization was vested in Science. It asks how the post-1945 efforts at specifying conditions of rationality for political decisions changed the meaning of “rationality.” It connects these developments to the interdisciplinary set of “decision sciences” that emerged in the 1950s around issues of strategic and political behavior and spawned our contemporary instruments of “conflict-resolution” or automated models of decision-making. The project suggests that “rationality” in political decision-making is not a transcendental norm, but a historically contingent benchmark dependent on its technical instrumentations. Democratizing political decision-making, then, means opening these models and instruments of rationalization to scholarly debate and public scrutiny.

628 004 €

Start date: 2011-12-01, End date: 2016-11-30

This project offers the first comprehensive study of medieval connections between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East in both Christian and Islamic contexts. It pursues the hypothesis that mobility and exchange along trade and pilgrimage routes, on both sides of and across the Red Sea, were not only vectors for the spread of Islam but also factors of African Christianities’ resiliency and reconfiguration at the same time. Medieval connections of Ethiopian and Nubian Christianities with other Eastern Christian churches have longer been studied than has been the spread of Islam across the Red Sea or along the Nile valley which remains poorly known. These parallel connections within Christen- and Islamdom across the same area have never been studied jointly, nor have been Christian-Muslim relations on such a scale. The project ultimately aims to reconnect the Horn of Africa to the global history of the area by connecting disjoint fields of research. It has the following objectives: • Providing a comprehensive survey of connections between the Horn of Africa and the Middle East (places, items, contexts) supported by a database and a geographic information system. • Analyzing human mobility in the area within three critical configurations: pilgrimages (both Christian and Muslim), slave trade and slavery, metropolization (with the case study of Cairo). • Exploring cultural transfer and dissemination in the area within and between Christen- and Islamdom through the circulation of books, models and narratives. • Evidencing regional connections and Christian-Muslim relations through archaeological survey at a very localised level: Nägaš (Ethiopia), a Muslim holy place in Christian environment related to the first exile (hijra) of Muḥammad’s companions. This project is groundbreaking in rallying around the PI historians working on the area’s various realms in their several written languages, in both Christian and Islamic contexts, from the Arab conquest until the Ottoman one.

1 859 656 €

Start date: 2017-11-01, End date: 2022-10-31