Foundation launches groundbreaking brain research initiative

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The Simons Foundation has launched an initiative to award grants totalling over $8 million annually for a decade to support research on how the brain processes sensorimotor interactions. The funding will back six research teams through the Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE), which brings together scientists from neuroscience and machine learning.

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SCENE is based on principles from ecological psychology, which suggests that the brain’s primary function is to encode “affordances” – the relationship between an object and the actions a person can perform. For instance, a chair “affords” the opportunity to sit, illustrating how perception and action are closely linked in the brain

Simons Foundation Vice President and Senior Scientist Alyssa Picchini Schaffer expressed excitement about the initiative, saying, “We received hundreds of intriguing proposals and are truly excited by the many outstanding scientific directions put forward by our community.” She added that the evaluation process was rigorous and that SCENE will “push the entire field forward by reshaping our understanding of cognition and behaviour.” Schaffer noted, “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

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