Researchers from Central European University (CEU) are joining a major new international effort launched by the Simons Foundation to understand how internal models in the brain guide behavior in real-world, complex environments.
The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience (SCENE) brings together twenty leading research groups across cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence to investigate how living organisms predict, interpret, and interact with dynamic, natural surroundings.
How Our Brains Model the Unpredictable World
At CEU, Máté Lengyel, Professor in the Department of Cognitive Science, will lead this ambitious collaboration. "In many ways, SCENE is a dream come true for me," said Professor Lengyel. "Both the scientific questions that we will be investigating and the ways in which SCENE's twenty different groups around the world are going to collaborate are very close to my ideal of cognitive and neuroscience.
What kind of internal models drive our interactions with our environment? Are they focused on things we can control and change? Are they focused on the rewarding aspects of the world? Or do our internal models simply reflect the predictable aspects of the world, regardless of whether those aspects are controllable or rewarding?
These sorts of questions go to the very core of human and animal intelligence - and even have implications for artificial intelligence. Personally, these questions have also been very close to my heart since the early years of my career. I have also always felt strongly that in order to make meaningful progress on these difficult questions, we need to build on solid theoretical foundations and then have stringent empirical tests of the mathematical theories we develop. SCENE's close collaboration between world-leading theoretical and experimental groups, with generous funding by the Simons Foundation, will allow us to realize this vision. I am honored to be leading this team, and I am excited by the opportunities it will provide for the Department of Cognitive Science, and in particular for the Center for Cognitive Computation, here at CEU's Budapest site."
Infant Development as a Window Into the Mind
Jonathan Kominsky, Assistant Professor at the Department of Cognitive Science, will also contribute to SCENE's groundbreaking research. "I'm thrilled to be able to contribute a human development perspective to this groundbreaking collaboration as a co-PI of the CEU Cognitive Development Center and the KinderKognition lab here in Vienna," said Kominsky.
"It takes humans much longer than most species to develop basic motor skills like grasping objects or moving ourselves around. The way an infant can interact with the objects, spaces, and people around them is very different at 4 months old compared to 6 months old, or 6 months old compared to 12 months old.
For the SCENE project, this offers a unique opportunity to examine how infants' internal models of the world change as they gain new ways of affecting it, and as they gain experience with their new motor skills over weeks and months. I'm very grateful for the opportunity to work with Máté and our amazing collaborators all over the world to answer these fundamental questions about how our minds work. I would like to extend my research on how we think about 'cause and effect' in the world around us to the question of what happens in our minds and brains when we first learn new ways to cause changes in the world ourselves."
About SCENE
The Simons Collaboration on Ecological Neuroscience aims to bridge the gap between controlled laboratory experiments and the complexity of real-world behavior. By investigating how internal brain models evolve and adapt in dynamic, unpredictable environments, SCENE researchers hope to uncover principles that not only explain natural intelligence but could also inform the development of next-generation AI systems.
Research teams in SCENE will integrate experiments across different species, naturalistic settings, and theoretical frameworks. The collaboration is generously funded by the Simons Foundation and is expected to run for ten years.
Participating Institutions
In addition to Central European University, participating institutions include:
New York University, University of Pittsburgh, Yale University, University of Cambridge, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Johns Hopkins University, University of Oregon, University of Minnesota, Carnegie Mellon University, Technical University of Darmstadt, Google DeepMind, Columbia University, Duke University, Stanford University, and the Weizmann Institute of Science.
