Todd Hare, from the University of Zurich, has received a CHF 846,963 grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation (SNSF). His project investigates how the brain’s reward systems distinguish between direct causes of rewards and cues merely linked to them.
Congratulations on your SNSF grant! Could you briefly explain what your new project is about in one or two sentences?
We aim to determine whether low-level reward learning systems in the brain prioritize cues that directly trigger a reward over those that are only correlated with rewards.
Could you elaborate a bit more on this?
We’ve noticed that current research on basic learning mechanisms tends to focus on how humans and animals respond to rewards. However, it doesn’t distinguish between stimuli that directly cause rewards and those that are merely associated with them. Humans, of course, can differentiate between cause and correlation in reasoning tasks, which happen at higher cognitive levels. But our question is whether this distinction exists even at the most basic level of learning.
How do you think your project’s outcomes will benefit society?
Understanding reward learning is crucial for both biological organisms and artificial intelligence. We want to pinpoint when and how animals distinguish between direct causes of rewards and cues that are just correlated with them. This could have significant implications for educational strategies, treating psychopathologies, and the development and application of AI.
What do you hope will be the most rewarding outcome of your project over the next four years?
Our main goal is to definitively answer this core question.
Thank you!
Useful links:
SNSF project description: https://data.snf.ch/grants/grant/10001345
About Todd Hare: https://www.econ.uzh.ch/en/people/faculty/hare.html
Image:
Dall-E and Todd Hare