The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) has awarded Veni grants to 17 postdoctoral researchers, enabling them to conduct research at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) or Amsterdam Medical Center (AMC-UvA). Of these, eight researchers will conduct their research in the field of cognition. Each researcher will receive an amount of €250,000. The grant will allow them to conduct research for a period of three years.

A total of 965 researchers applied for a Veni grant from the NWO this year, of which 159 were successful. These applications were assessed by scientists from the Netherlands and abroad.

Grant recipients

• Dr Jan Brascamp (Cognitive Neuroscience): Consciousness and the brain
  How is neural activity translated into conscious observation? Neural scientists make use of visual illusions that trick our visual perception: the same image appears to be different every time we look at it. Brascamp measures which neural activities are involved in this changing pattern of observation in order to identify how neural processes determine our conscious perception.

• Dr Michael Franke (Logic, Language and Computation/Philosophy): How psychological and social factors influence the evolution of language
  Language was able to evolve because humans began to use consistent sounds for a variety of social purposes. In this project Franke will study the effect of psychological and social factors on the evolution of language, focusing on the different meanings of adjectives.

• Dr Lindred Greer (Labour and Organisation Psychology): Threats and conflict within management teams
  Teams with a great deal of power, such as management teams or the task forces of world leaders, have an enormous impact on society. However, these groups often tend to experience internal power struggles. Greer will be attempting to identify the underlying psychosocial process.

• Dr Aline Honingh (Logic, Language and Computation): Music representation
  The most effective way of representing music (such as standard notation, mp3) depends on the application. In this project Honingh will assess the optimal form of representation for the purpose of music classification (such as jazz or rock). The study should yield a better understanding of the way in which people classify music, as well as practical applications such as music search engines.

• Dr Carien Lansink (Life Sciences): Inextricably linked in the brain
  When we see a tea glass fall and simultaneously hear the sound of breaking glass, we experience a single event. This is due to our brain´s ability to seamlessly integrate different flows of sensory information. Lansink will be assessing how the different areas of our brain cooperate to achieve this outcome.

• Dr Eva van Lier (Linguistics): Languages without word classes?
  European languages have word classes, such as verbs (to designate actions) and nouns (to designate objects). Some Oceanic languages do not appear to apply this distinction. Van Lier will be assessing whether these languages feature other types of word classes, and what this tells us about the use of categorisation in human language and thought.

• Dr Floris Roelofsen (Logic, Language, and Computation): Interpreting questions
  How do we determine what a question actually means? Minor changes in the word order or intonation of a question can lead to major differences in terms of its interpretation. How does this process work? Roelofsen will be developing a mathematical model that automatically derives a question’s meaning.

• Dr Eric Ruhé (Psychiatry): Analysing the reward system in therapy-resistant depressions
  Our ability to learn from positive events is disrupted during a depression. Ruhé will be analysing MRI scans from two groups of patients (therapy-resistant/non-resistant) in order to measure how they establish connections between signal and reward (conditioning). He will then measure how this reward system is affected by treatment with antidepressants.

About the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme

The Veni grant is one of three funding channels of the Innovational Research Incentives Scheme (Vernieuwingsimpuls). The other two consist of the Vidi grant (for experienced postdocs) and the Vici grant (for highly experienced researchers). The Innovational Research Incentives Scheme was established in collaboration with the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) and the various universities. The Innovational Research Incentives Scheme allows The Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) to provide talented researchers the means they need to conduct innovative and groundbreaking research.