ERC FUNDED PROJECTS

To successfully complete secondary education, persistent learning behavior is essential. Why are some adolescents more resilient to setbacks at school than others? In addition to actual ability, students’ implicit beliefs about the nature of their abilities have major impact on their motivation and achievements. Ability beliefs range from viewing abilities as “entities” that cannot be improved much by effort (entity beliefs), to believing that they are incremental with effort and time (incremental beliefs). Importantly, ability beliefs shape which goals a student pursues at school; proving themselves (performance goals) or improving themselves (learning goals). The central aims of the proposal are to unravel 1) the underlying processing mechanisms of how beliefs and goals shape resilience to setbacks at school and 2) how to influence these mechanisms to stimulate persistent learning behavior. Functional brain research, including my own, has revealed the profound top-down influence of goals on selective information processing. Goals may thus determine which learning-related information is attended. Project 1 jointly investigates the essential psychological and neurobiological processes to unravel the longitudinal effects of beliefs and goals on how the brain prioritizes information during learning, and how this relates to school outcomes. Project 2 reveals how to influence this interplay with the aim to long-lastingly stimulate persistent learning behavior. I will move beyond existing approaches by introducing a novel intervention in which students experience their own learning-related brain activity and its malleability. The results will demonstrate how ability beliefs and goals shape functional brain development and school outcomes during adolescence, and how we can optimally stimulate this interplay. The research has high scientific impact as it bridges multiple disciplines and thereby provides a strong impulse to the emerging field of educational neuroscience.

1 597 291 €

Start date: 2017-03-01, End date: 2022-02-28

Why do we perceive objects? Visual perception starts with localized filters that subdivide the image into fragments that undergo separate analyses. Our visual system has to reconstruct the objects that surround us. It has to bind image fragments of the same object and to segregate them from other objects and the background. The standard view in psychology is that perceptual grouping is achieved by a parallel, pre-attentive process that relies on Gestalt grouping cues. My work has started to challenge this view by demonstrating that the visual cortex also implements a serial, attention-demanding algorithm for perceptual grouping. This grouping process may represent the first serial brain algorithm that can be understood at the psychological, neurophysiological and computational level. The present proposal therefore has the potential to revolutionize our view of visual cognition. Understanding feature binding would represent a breakthrough in cognitive neuroscience. Different brain areas represent distinct visual features. How is activity in these areas integrated? We propose that perceptual grouping relies on two complementary processes, “base-grouping” and “incremental grouping”. We hypothesize that base-grouping is pre-attentive and relies on feed-forward connections from lower to higher areas that activate neurons and determine their stimulus selectivity. In contrast, we propose that incremental grouping relies on feedback and horizontal connections, which propagate enhanced neuronal activity to highlight all the features that belong to the same perceptual object. The present proposal will determine the role of attention in feature binding, the interactions between brain areas for grouping with fMRI in humans and with electrophysiology in non-human primates to reveal the algorithms for perceptual grouping as they are implemented in our brains.

2 500 000 €

Start date: 2014-05-01, End date: 2019-04-30

Nanopores have emerged in the past few years as a promising analytical technique. The basic concept of nanopore sensing is to apply a potential across individual nanoscale pores and observe the disruption of the ionic flow caused by single molecules entering the pore. Ionic currents through protein pores have been successful at recognizing tiny differences in molecules in solution. Most notably, arrays of thousands of nanopores integrated in low-cost and portable devices are now capable of sequencing DNA at the single-molecule level. The main challenge of nanopore sensing is the inability of controlling the protein pore diameter and geometry, which determines the signal and enables selectivity based on physical size. The aim of this proposal is to design a new generation of protein nanopores that will take on the next grand challenge in nanopore sensing, that is the sequence identification of single proteins. In order to sequence proteins, the designed nanopores must: unfold a target protein, control the speed of its transit across the nanopore and recognize individual amino acids. Our approach is to design a transmembrane molecular machine that will unfold target proteins and feed the linearize polypeptide through the nanopore where single amino acids will be recognized by modulations of the nanopore current. The specific objectives are: i) Develop chemical and biotechnological methods to design synthetic protein-based pores ii) To precisely attach the unfolding machine to a nanopore iii) To genetically engineer the nanopore for optimal amino acid recognition Our nanopore devices will be used to develop the first technology to sequence single proteins. Compared to the state of the art ‘shotgun proteomics’, the nanopore approach will allow long polypeptide reads, recognition of low-abundance proteins, including biomarkers linked to diseases, and real-time monitoring with minimal cost, time and sample preparation.

1 999 970 €

Start date: 2017-07-01, End date: 2022-06-30

The objective of DEPRIVEDHOODS is to come to a better understanding of the relationship between socio-economic inequality, poverty and neighbourhoods. The spatial concentration of poverty within cities is of great concern to national governments, partly based on a belief in neighbourhood effects: the idea that living in deprived neighbourhoods has an additional negative effect on residents’ life chances over and above the effect of their own characteristics. This belief has contributed to the development of area-based policies designed to introduce a more ‘favourable’ socio-economic mix in deprived neighbourhoods. Despite the persistent belief in neighbourhood effects, there is surprisingly little evidence that living in deprived neighbourhoods really affects individual lives. There is little consensus on the importance of neighbourhood effects, the underlying causal mechanisms, the conditions under which they are important and the most effective policy responses. It is likely that most studies claiming to have found that poor neighbourhoods make people poor(er) only show that poor people live in poor neighbourhoods because they cannot afford to live elsewhere. DEPRIVEDHOODS will break new ground by simultaneously studying neighbourhood sorting over the life course, neighbourhood change, and neighbourhood effects, within one theoretical and analytical framework. This project will be methodologically challenging and will be the first integrated, multi-country research project on neighbourhood effects to use unique geo-referenced longitudinal data from Sweden, United Kingdom, Estonia, and The Netherlands. Special attention will be paid to the operationalization of neighbourhoods and how it affects modelling outcomes. Through its integrated and international approach, DEPRIVEDHOODS will fundamentally advance understandings of the ways in which individual outcomes interact with the neighbourhood, which will ultimately lead to more targeted and effective policy measures.

1 996 506 €

Start date: 2014-08-01, End date: 2019-07-31

This project is a study of the regulation of ‘mixture’(‘interracial’ sex, relationships and marriage) in Europe’s past and present. Informed by critical race and critical mixed race studies, it challenges the common assumption that Europe never had ‘anti-miscegenation’ laws comparable to those in the United States. In exploring if, when, how and why forms of regulation aiming to prevent or restrict ‘interracial mixture’ developed in Europe in certain times and places, the project delivers a vital contribution to our knowledge of the development of racial thinking in Europe. The concept of ‘mixture’ provides an eminently suitable approach to the construction of ‘race’, since ‘mixture’ confuses and destabilizes racialized categories that seem fixed and essentialized in specific times and places, such as ‘black/white’. The project consist of a historical and a contemporary part. The historical part looks at the regulation of ‘mixture’ in four European countries: France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, in their African colonies, and wartime Europe. The contemporary part explores whether and how, in spite of norms of formal equality and colour-blindness, ‘race’ and ‘monoracial family norms’ still play a part in European law and the lived experiences of ‘interracial’ couples with law in their everyday lives. Through archival research, legal analysis and interviews with modern-day ‘mixed’ couples and families, this approach helps us understand what lawmakers and enforcers believed ‘race’ was, what they believed ‘mixture’ was, how this was translated into legal practices, and how targeted couples responded. Theoretically, the project delivers a groundbreaking contribution to the genealogy of racial thinking in Europe, especially in addressing the understudied role of law and legal scholarship in the social construction of ‘race’ and ‘mixture’ in a increasingly diverse Europe.

1 999 823 €

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

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

In 2012, the European Commission launched the campaign Science: It’s a girl thing!, aimed at encouraging women to choose research careers, as they are sorely underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Given that gender disparities in aptitude for specific fields are generally very small, highly gendered skewness in educational choices suggest pathways dictated by stereotypes rather than abilities, leaving valuable STEM talents unused. Many European countries have invested in boosting girls’ participation in STEM through workshops with girl-oriented science topics, contact with female role models, and information packages. However, the vast majority of these initiatives have not been scientifically evaluated. Further, most programs leave untouched one of the key underlying processes keeping girls from STEM that emerge from the research literature, namely daily socialization reinforcing gender stereotypes in the school and family context. I aim to fill this gap by developing a video-feedback intervention aimed at reducing teachers’ (largely unconscious) gendered classroom interactions in primary and secondary schools, testing its effectiveness in reducing gender disparities in STEM in a randomized control trial (RCT), and longitudinally investigating salient family processes from infancy to late adolescence to inform parent education programs. This approach is innovative because it is the first to apply and rigorously test a video-feedback intervention aimed at reducing gendered interactions in schools. Further, the comprehensive scope of the study design is unique because it includes children and adolescents across development in both the school and the family context. The insights from this study will provide new avenues for both research and practice regarding gender socialization. The project fits seamlessly with my expertise in gender socialization, and experience with longitudinal and RCT projects in schools and families.

1 999 342 €

Start date: 2017-06-01, End date: 2022-05-31

With numerous failures to replicate, common misreporting of results, widespread failure to publish non-significant results or to share data, and considerable potential bias due the flexibility of analyses of data and researcher’s tendency to exploit that flexibility, psychological science is said to experience a crisis of confidence. These issues lead to dissemination of false positive results and inflate effect size estimates in meta-analyses. This leads to poor theory building, an inefficient scientific system, a waste of resources, lower trust in psychological science, and psychology’s outcomes being less useful for society. After having contributed to the literature highlighting these problems the goal of my ERC project is to improve psychological science by offering novel solutions to five vexing challenges: (1) I want to counter misreporting of results by using our new tool statcheck in several studies on reviewers’ tendency to demand perfection and by applying it to actual peer review. (2) I want to counter the biasing effects of common explorations of data (p-hacking) by professing and studying pre-registration and by developing promising new approaches called blind analysis and cross-validation using differential privacy that simultaneously allows for exploration and confirmation with the same data. (3) I want to counter the common problem of selective outcome reporting in psychological experiments by developing powerful latent variable methods that render it fruitless to not report all outcome variables in a study. (4) I want to counter the problem of publication bias by studying and correcting misinterpretations of non-significance. (5) I want to develop and refine meta-analytic methods that allow for the correction of biases that currently inflate estimates of effects and obscure moderation. The innovative tools I develop have the potential to improve the way psychologists (and other scientists) analyse data, disseminate findings, and draw inferences.

1 999 748 €

Start date: 2017-06-01, End date: 2022-05-31

Increasingly our societies are becoming more diverse and how to live with this diversity is one of the most pressing questions of our time. In Europe, intergroup tolerance has been proposed as a key aspect of living harmoniously and productively with diversity; it is critical because objection and disagreement about what is good and right are inevitable. A diverse, egalitarian, and peaceful society does not require that we all like each other, but it does require that people at least tolerate one another. Yet, there has been very little by way of social psychological theorizing and systematic empirical research on intergroup toleration. This research will advance the state of the art in the social sciences by moving beyond intergroup stereotypes, prejudices and discrimination, and focusing on the social psychology of intergroup toleration in which differences are endured. This new line of research will unravel the interrelated aspects of toleration. We will elucidate: (1) the underlying psychological aspects of tolerance (the objection component), 2) the psychological processes underlying tolerance (the acceptance component), 3) the limits of tolerance (the rejection component), and 4) the social psychological consequences of being tolerated. This program has a coherent theoretical framework and empirically toleration will be examined by using a combination of survey data, framing experiments, and lab experiments involving EEG. The research will provide key insights into the social psychological dynamics of intergroup toleration. This can form the basis for developing and implementing initiatives and approaches that contribute to a more tolerant society. Given the contested nature of cultural diversity and the absence of systematic social psychological investigations, the proposed research is both ground-breaking and timely.

2 205 494 €

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

Even in the absence of legal ownership, people tend to experience objects, places, and ideas as belonging to them (‘mine’). This state of mind is called psychological ownership. Research has shown that experiences of ownership are very important for individuals, but can also lead to interpersonal conflicts. What we know almost nothing about is collective psychological ownership (CPO): a shared sense that something is ‘ours’. CPO might be especially relevant with regard to territories and in the context of intergroup relations. Statements like ‘we were here first’ or ‘we built this country’ are increasingly used by right-wing politicians in immigration countries to claim ownership on historical basis for the dominant ethnic group, and to exclude newcomers. There are also contexts where two established groups disagree about territorial ownership, such as Albanians and Serbs in Kosovo. While CPO might strengthen solidarity within groups, it might worsen intergroup relations, thus threatening social cohesion. It is important to establish where a sense of CPO comes from, and how it shapes intergroup relations, so that interventions could be implemented. This ground-breaking project examines 1) the extent to which people perceive their ethnic group as historically owning the country, 2) the psychological needs that motivate them to claim collective ownership, and 3) the implications of collective ownership claims for attitudes towards ethnic groups. My approach is multidisciplinary, combining social psychological theories on intergroup relations with the literature on ownership and territoriality from organizational science and anthropology. I will develop an instrument to measure CPO and provide first empirical evidence about the importance of CPO by collecting representative survey data in European immigration countries (Netherlands, UK, France), settler societies (Australia, New Zealand, USA), and countries with clear territorial disputes (Kosovo, Cyprus, Israel).

1 499 082 €

Start date: 2017-04-01, End date: 2022-03-31

We always take in a certain perspective when we speak. Languages have a wide variety of linguistic means to express perspective. While perspectival elements are most of the time used from the perspective of the speaker, they can also be used from the perspective of someone else, a possibility that is fully exploited in narratives. The central aim of this project is to deepen our understanding of perspective shifts. It will not only elucidate the semantic and pragmatic mechanisms underlying interpretation shifts of specific expressions, but also unite them in a general formal model of perspective shift. Moreover, these insights will be used to unravel the linguistic grounding of narrative perspective. The project will focus on Ancient Greek, a language with a particularly rich perspective system. Not only do many classes of expressions involve perspective in some way (e.g. attitudinal particles, optative mood, tense and aspect, evaluatives, participles), but authors like Thucydides are also known for their subtle manipulation of narrative perspective. It is far from clear, however, how these shifts in narrative perspective are effected by the linguistic expressions used. This project will study (i) the relation between attitudinal particles and perspective shifts, (ii) the role of evaluative expressions, and (iii) the relation between temporal perspective and narrative perspective. State-of-the-art computational methods will be used to extract data from existing corpora, revealing patterns that have eluded traditional methods; this methodology will be a major innovation in the field of classical philology. The present project goes beyond previous semantic studies (i) by investigating more subtle and pervasive ways of perspective creation than the free indirect discourse technique and (ii) through the development of a general formal model of perspective shift, integrating the contribution of several perspective involving expressions.

1 044 798 €

Start date: 2013-12-01, End date: 2018-11-30

Languages have various ways of referring to collections like families, herds and forests. The grammatical properties of collective expressions critically determine how we understand them. The sentences “this forest is old” and “these trees are old” categorize an arboreal collection using a concept (“old”), while conveying different meanings. This semantic difference correlates with the difference in grammatical number between the sentences: singular vs. plural. Such effects of collective categorization in language are crucial for understanding the connections between grammar and the mind, as well as for artificial intelligence. However, currently little is known about the mechanisms underlying our linguistic ability to conceptualize collections. This project aims to develop a novel linguistic theory of this ability, applied to a wide range of empirical phenomena and interdisciplinary challenges in computational semantics and comparative linguistics, benefiting from the recent synergy between linguistics and the psychology of concepts. The idea is that when classifying a collection, speakers rely on two inferential principles with mental concepts: (i) geometric inferences: a forest is considered “far away” if all of its trees are far; (ii) symmetric inferences: two trees are “similar” if each of them is similar to the other. The leading hypothesis is that uniform interactions between these inferential principles and the grammar of collective expressions account for collective categorization in language. This hypothesis is explored in three work packages, each of which develops the semantic theory and evaluates it on a different interdisciplinary domain: human interaction with geographic information systems, behavioral linguistic experiments, and comparative linguistics. Together, the three components of the project are expected to lead to a theoretical breakthrough in semantic theory and to enrich its interdisciplinary connections with neighboring disciplines.

2 494 279 €

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

My goal is to optically detect the magnetic resonance of free radicals/ROS inside cells. Radicals are suspected to play a crucial role in numerous pathogenic conditions including diseases responsible for most deaths worldwide (as arteriosclerosis, cancer, immune responses to pathogens). They are also involved in many processes in healthy cells as mitochondrial metabolism or aging of cells and part of the working mechanism of many drugs. Despite their relevance relatively little is known about where and when radicals are built, how they work or which ones play a role. Their short lifetime and reactivity poses a problem for many state of the art methods. Thus they are often a bottleneck in understanding stress responses. My goal is to develop a method, which can detect their magnetic resonance in the nanoscale. The method is based on a fluorescent defect in diamond, which changes its optical properties based on its magnetic surrounding. While this technique has been able to detect even the faint signal of a single electron spin, this technique is entirely new to biological fields. We can localize where, when and how much of a certain radical is generated with nm resolution. This is impossible with the current state of the art. Furthermore, since we obtain spectra we can also differentiate radicals to some extent. I am proposing to investigate two systems: 1) the involvement of radicals in the aging of yeast cells 2) the response of macrophages to stress. In the first project I will test the so-called free radical theory, which states that organisms age because cells accumulate free radical damage over time. In the second project I will answer the question how a macrophage reacts to the impact of a pathogen or a drug. Outcomes of this project would enable us to increase our understanding on how stress responses work on a molecular level. This will open up new possibilities to assess if and how drugs are working or how and why certain pathogens are worse than others.

1 454 714 €

Start date: 2017-03-01, End date: 2022-02-28

Activity-based analysis and modelling has rapidly gained momentum in transportation, urban planning, and geography. It examines which activities are conducted where, when, for how long, with whom, and the transport mode and route involved at a very fine scale of spatial and temporal resolution. All currently operational models are concerned with daily activity-travel patterns and do not consider any dynamics, illustrating the limitations of current approaches. This proposal reflects the ambition to achieve breakthroughs in the analysis and modelling of DYNAMIC activity-travel patterns, integrating long-term, mid-term and short-term time horizons: the research agenda in this field of research for the next decade. Several PhD projects will analyze and model the impact of innovative policies concerned with urban futures (focusing on new urban forms, creative pricing policies, restricted energy, community-based social networks and personalized guidance systems) on behavioural change in activity-travel patterns. Results will be integrated into a new generation multi-agent activity-based system to simulate primary and secondary effects of various types of policies on dynamic activity-travel patterns and therefore on accessibility, mobility, time use, energy consumption, social exclusion, and economic welfare. A large scale panel survey of dynamic activity-travel patterns (supposed to be the first of its kind in the world), and (virtual reality) adaptation experiments will be used for the analyses and estimating and validating the models. The project will lead to (i) a better understanding and an integrative framework and simulation model to assess the primary and secondary effects of various types of policies on sustainable urban environments in terms of a series of indicators (mobility, accessibility, energy use, etc.), derived from dynamics activity-travel patterns and (ii) guidelines how the effectiveness of such policies can be improved.

2 461 681 €

Start date: 2009-01-01, End date: 2013-12-31