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How the brain creates Mutual Understanding during Social InteraCtion

Objective

How can we understand one another? Our everyday conversations appear to revolve around our linguistic abilities. But creating mutual understanding involves more than formulating grammatically correct sentences. Recently, cognitive science has shown that mutual understanding relies on shared knowledge and beliefs, conceptual knowledge that is continuously adjusted as we interact. Yet, social neuroscience has mainly focused on how individuals respond to social stimuli without a social context. Consequently, the neural mechanism that underlies our ability to create mutual understanding with another person remains largely elusive. The proposed project addresses this interdisciplinary gap, testing the hypothesis that creating mutual understanding requires a neural mechanism that supports a continuous adjustment of conceptual knowledge. That hypothesis will be tested by sampling and interfering with neuronal activity in humans during live social interaction, at the University of California. First, I will investigate the neuronal implementation of mutual understanding through intracranial recordings from the human brain. The exquisite spatiotemporal precision of these recordings offers the unprecedented possibility to characterize how conceptual knowledge is mechanistically adjusted during social interaction. Second, I will investigate frontotemporal dementia, a neurological disorder known to disrupt access to conceptual knowledge. This unfortunate experiment of nature offers the unique opportunity to understand how progressive alteration in brain tissue and connectivity affects the ability to create mutual understanding. These studies will offer a neural- and system-level mechanism of human mutual understanding, which I will translate into testable accounts of communicative alterations in a range of neurological and psychiatric disorders, during the return phase at the Donders Institute and King’s College London.

Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)

CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: https://op.europa.eu/en/web/eu-vocabularies/euroscivoc.

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

MSCA-IF-GF - Global Fellowships

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Call for proposal

Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.

(opens in new window) H2020-MSCA-IF-2014

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Coordinator

STICHTING RADBOUD UNIVERSITEIT
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 260 929,80
Address
HOUTLAAN 4
6525 XZ Nijmegen
Netherlands

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Region
Oost-Nederland Gelderland Arnhem/Nijmegen
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
Links
Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 260 929,80

Partners (1)

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