ERC grant awarded to Prof. Niels Taatgen

The number of Starting Grants that the European Research Council (ERC) has awarded to researchers from the University of Groningen this year has risen to nine. This week it was announced that the application of Prof. Niels Taatgen of the Department of Artificial Intelligence will also be honoured with an ERC grant. Taatgen has been awarded EUR 1.5 million for five years of research.

 
Taatgen has been awarded his ERC grant for research into how people can multitask better (‘Towards Safe and Productive Human Multitasking’). His starting point is that people are in principle able to multitask, but that this can sometimes go wrong due to several tasks needing the same part of the brain at the same time. The project will concentrate in particular on the issue of why people seem to want to do many things at the same time, and what circumstances control whether this is safe and productive or not. To this end behaviour experiments will be conducted and computer simulations of humans while multitasking will be designed. These will then be studied with the help of fMRI brain processes.

More information: Prof. Niels Taatgen