Funding by European Research Council
Cluster Member Prof. Dr. Dr. Pulvermüller Received Funding for the Project »Material Constraints Enabling Human Cognition«
The European Research Council is the premiere European funding organisation for excellent frontier research. A total of 1881 proposals were submitted, of which 35 ERC Advanced Grants went to Germany.
The project »Material Constraints Enabling Human Cognition« will be funded with 2.5 million euros and will use novel insights from human neurobiology translated into mathematically exact computational models to find new answers to long-standing questions in cognitive science, linguistics and philosophy.
Recent breakthroughs in comparative neurobiological research highlight specific features of the connectivity structure of the human brain, which open new perspectives on understanding the neural mechanisms of human-specific higher cognition and language. In delineating the material basis of human cognition and language, neurobiologically founded modelling appears as the method of choice, as it allows not only ›external fitting‹ of models to key experimental data, but, in addition, for ›internal‹ or ›material fitting‹ of the model components to the structure of brains, cortical areas and neuronal circuits.
This novel research pathway offers biologically well-founded and computationally precise perspectives on addressing exciting hitherto unanswered fundamental questions, such as: How can humans build vocabularies of tens and hundreds of thousands of words, whereas our closest evolutionary relatives typically use below 100? How is semantic meaning implemented for gestures and words, and, more specifically, for referential and categorical terms? How can grounding and interpretability of abstract symbols be anchored biologically?
Friedemann Pulvermüller is teaching Linguistics and Neuroscience of Language at the Department of Philosophy of the Freie Universität Berlin and the Berlin School of Mind and Brain. He had been taking PhDs in Linguistics and Psychology at the Universities of Tübingen and Konstanz before joining the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit at Cambridge University as a Programme Leader in the Neuroscience of Language. In 2011, he moved to the Freie Universität. He is PI at the Einstein Center of Neuroscience Berlin and at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material«.
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