ERC Consolidator Grant of around 2.3 million EUR for brain researcher Radoslaw Martin Cichy at Freie Universität Berlin
FU Berlin, No. 277/2023 from November 23, 2023
https://www.fu-berlin.de/presse/informationen/fup/2023/fup_23_277-erc-grant-radoslaw-cichy/index.html
The European Research Council (ERC) is supporting a new research project by cognitive scientist Prof. Dr. Radoslaw Martin Cichy with an ERC Consolidator Grant. The scientist from Freie Universität Berlin will receive around 2.3 million euros for his five-year research project "A theory and model of the neural transformations mediating human object perception" (TRANSFORM). The project aims to shed light on the processing and transformation of visual information in the brain and analyze how human vision develops. The neuroscientist had already received an ERC Starting Grant from the European Research Council in 2018: “Cracking the Neural Code of Human Object Vision (CRACK)”, which will be completed in 2024.
In the blink of an eye, the human brain transforms the photons that hit the retina into a detailed perception of the world. This world consists of everyday objects, such as tables, chairs or cups, and by knowing what the objects are and how they appear to us, we understand the meaning of the world around us. However, despite intensive research, it has so far remained unclear how the transformations take place in the brain that make the perception of objects possible in the first place. "The aim of TRANSFORM is to develop a better theory of the processing of visual information in the brain, which we call the transformations that underlie vision," says Radoslaw Martin Cichy. Building on this, the aim is to clarify how these transformations control behavior. "It will be particularly exciting to elucidate the development of transformations from infancy to adulthood. We have only been able to tackle this thanks to the research of recent years," says Radoslaw Martin Cichy. In order to achieve these goals, Radoslaw Martin Cichy's research team will apply an interdisciplinary strategy that combines psychology, neuroscience and computer science.
Prof. Dr. Radoslaw Martin Cichy has been Professor of Neurocognitive and Experimental Psychology at Freie Universität Berlin since 2020. He is also Director of the Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Berlin at Freie Universität Berlin. Radoslaw Martin Cichy originally studied cognitive science at the University of Osnabrück. After a stay abroad at the University of Oxford (philosophy), he studied medical neuroscience at the Charité in Berlin, where he completed his doctorate in psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience. Cichy was a doctoral member of the Berlin School of Mind and Brain 2006–2010. After a research stay at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), he returned to Freie Universität Berlin.
Contact
Prof. Dr. Radoslaw Martin Cichy, Freie Universität Berlin, Department of Education and Psychology, Center for Cognitive Neuroscience Berlin (CCNB), e-mail: rmcichy@zedat.fu-berlin.de, web: https://www.ewi-psy.fu-berlin.de/psychologie/arbeitsbereiche/neural_dyn_of_vis_cog/team/rm_cichy/index.html
