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Research cluster receives new funds

A group of researchers led by Julia Fischer and Stefan Treue of the German Primate Center and Göttingen University have received project funds from Lower Saxony’s Ministry of Science and Culture and the Volkswagen Foundation of about one million Euro. The funding will support research on the cognitive abilities of non-human and human primates. The money is also part of a plan to prepare the science community of Göttingen for the upcoming competition „Bund-Länder-Initiative“, which succeeds the Excellence Initiative.
Das Foto zeigt zwei Rhesusaffen.
The researchers from Göttingen want to measure, which brain activities are triggered while rhesus macaques like these watch facial expressions of conspecifics. Photo: Margrit Hampe
Das Foto zeigt Julia Fischer in Afrika.
Prof. Dr. Julia Fischer, speaker of the the Leibniz Science Campus "Primate Cognition", during field research in Senegal. Photo: Ulrike Barnett
Das Foto zeigt Stefan Treue
Prof. Dr. Stefan Treue, neuroscientist and director of the DPZ, is proxy speaker of the Leibniz Science Campus "Primate Cognition". Photo: Ingo Bulla

The collaborative research cluster consists of members of the Leibniz Science Campus "Primate Cognition" and other researchers from Göttingen. The funding is provided through the program "Niedersächsisches Vorab"; in the current round, a total of 6.6 million Euro were granted for seven projects. "Through this funding, we can expand our methodical and analytic approaches ", comments Julia Fischer, who is also speaker of the Leibniz Science Campus. "We want to establish a joint experimental platform for socio-cognitive tests with monkeys and humans", Fischer explains. Among other studies, the scientists plan to investigate the influence of social stimuli on the processing of information in humans and monkeys.

Data will be obtained, for example, by measuring the brain activity in areas responsible for processing visual information while test subjects are shown pictures of emotional facial expressions. A close collaboration with psychologists of Göttingen University will enable comparative studies of the development of cognitive capacities and decision-making processes in humans and monkeys. Fundamental insights into socio-cognitive disorders or neurodegenerative diseases in humans will be obtained through contributions from scientists from the University Medical Center Göttingen and several Max Planck institutes. To achieve this, the scientists will, for instance, employ functional magnetic resonance imaging techniques. "To merge the various datasets that will be collected this way, we will develop novel procedures for the analysis of complex data streams", Fischer adds.

The collaborative research cluster will use the funding of about one million Euro to allow several junior researchers to work for two years at the German Primate Center, Göttingen University and other local research institutes. An important approach of the research collective is therefore an intensive cooperation within the Göttingen Campus, which will, as a platform infrastructure for the promotion of collaborative research, also receive funds from the "Niedersächsischer Vorab" program.

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