image: Graphical illustration demonstrating how affordances (opportunities for action offered by one's surrounding environment) can influence behavior.
Credit: Jun Cen/Simons Foundation
We are constantly perceiving the world around us. As we do, we make decisions on how to move our bodies. The brain’s ability to process all the required sensory and motor information for this is no small feat. And one of neuroscience’s most significant questions is how exactly our brains integrate these two information sources as efficiently as they do.
The newly launched Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE) will unite leading scientists across neuroscience and machine learning to discover how the brain represents ‘sensorimotor’ (that is, sensory and motor) interactions.
“We are excited to enable a collaborative research program that uses the framework of ecological neuroscience to understand brain function,” says Kelsey Martin, executive vice president of autism and neuroscience at the Simons Foundation. “With an interdisciplinary approach, we hope to discover fundamental principles of cognition applicable across species.”
SCENE builds on principles from ecological psychology, which posit that one of the brain’s core functions is to encode affordances. An affordance is an opportunity for action available in an environment — for example, a chair affords the opportunity to sit. By encoding affordances, the brain closely links perception with action. Identifying how the brain encodes and uses this information will bridge gaps in our understanding of cognition.
The collaboration, which will officially begin July 1, will provide over $8M per year across six teams of researchers. These teams will include scientists dedicated to theory and data science as well as brain modeling in species ranging from rodents and bats to humans.
Simons Neuroscience Collaborations are designed to span 10 years, enabling scientists to conduct large-scale longitudinal studies that typically aren’t feasible under conventional grants. These collaborations bring together groups of outstanding scientists to address fundamental questions about brain function, focusing on fields in which significant developments have created novel opportunities for exploration. Current neuroscience programs include the Simons Collaboration on the Global Brain and the Simons Collaboration on Plasticity and the Aging Brain
“We received hundreds of intriguing proposals and are truly excited by the many outstanding scientific directions put forward by our community,” says Alyssa Picchini Schaffer, vice president and senior scientist of the Simons Collaborations in Neuroscience. “It was a rigorous evaluation process, and we are confident that SCENE will push the entire field forward by reshaping our understanding of cognition and behavior.”
The collaboration includes 20 principal investigators:
Dora Angelaki (New York University)
Aaron Batista (University of Pittsburgh)
Tesca Fitzgerald (Yale University)
Jonathan Kominsky (Central European University)
Máté Lengyel (University of Cambridge and Central European University)*
Alexander Mathis (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)
Mackenzie Mathis (École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne)*
Cynthia Moss (Johns Hopkins University)
Cris Niell (University of Oregon)
Jean-Paul Noel (University of Minnesota)
Xaq Pitkow (Carnegie Mellon University)
Constantin Rothkopf (Technical University of Darmstadt)
Cristina Savin (New York University)
Kimberly Stachenfeld (Columbia University and Google DeepMind)
Nanthia Suthana (Duke University)
Andreas Tolias (Stanford University)
Nachum Ulanovsky (Weizmann Institute of Science)
Daniel Wolpert (Columbia University)*
Alex Wong (Yale University)
Jan Zimmermann (University of Minnesota)
*Executive committee member
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About the Simons Foundation
The Simons Foundation is a private foundation in New York City whose mission is to advance the frontiers of research in mathematics and the basic sciences. Founded in 1994 by Jim and Marilyn Simons, the foundation supports transformative science through grantmaking, in-house research and public engagement. The Simons Foundation provides grants in autism science and neuroscience; life sciences; mathematics and physical sciences; and science, society and culture. The foundation’s in-house research division, the Flatiron Institute, develops and deploys computational methods to advance basic scientific research. To learn more, visit simonsfoundation.org.