UBB obtains first ERC grant in Romania in the field of psychology

The Babeş-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca (UBB) has obtained a grant of almost 1.5 million euros from the European Research Council (ERC), within the Starting Grant competition, for a project dedicated to the relationship between unconscious processes and conscious experience. According to the university, the funding represents a first for psychology in Romania.

• Five-year funded research

The project, entitled GENESIS - "Hidden in Plain Sight: The Genesis of Conscious Experience from Statistical Regularities”, is coordinated by lect. univ. dr. Răzvan Jurchiş, from the Faculty of Psychology and Educational Sciences of UBB. The university specifies that the project received an A grade in the ERC Starting Grant competition, and the requested amount, of 1,489,715 euros, was granted in full. The research will be carried out over a period of five years. The ERC Starting Grants are intended for researchers at the beginning of their independent careers and are awarded following a European competition focused on scientific excellence. According to UBB, it is the first ERC grant obtained by a Romanian institution in the field of psychology since the establishment of the European Research Council in 2007.

• How does unconscious information become conscious experience

The GENESIS project starts from one of the fundamental questions of psychology and cognitive science: how does what we learn without realizing it become part of our conscious experience? The researchers' hypothesis is that conscious experience may arise through a process of information compression. Complex structures learned unconsciously would be transformed by the mind into simpler and more easily accessible conscious representations. This hypothesis may explain situations in which people use information that they are not able to explain consciously. UBB offers as examples the grammatical rules used by speakers of a language without them being able to formulate them explicitly or the movements performed by athletes without each stage of a sequence being able to be described verbally. "What we think we know about the reasons for our own actions may not always faithfully reflect the processes that actually guided our behavior,” explained Răzvan Jurchiş, the project coordinator.

The research will follow, starting from this premise, how regularities and structures learned unconsciously are transformed into conscious representations.

• A first for Romanian psychology

For UBB, obtaining the grant represents both a recognition of the project and the researcher who coordinates it, and an indicator of the university's ability to compete for high-level European funding. "An ERC grant represents one of the strongest such validations,” declared the UBB rector, prof. univ. dr. psych. Daniel David, who emphasized that the research topic continues a direction developed by the Cluj school of psychology in the field of unconscious information processing. European funding will allow the development, over the next five years, of a research program dedicated to the relationship between unconscious processes and conscious experience. At the same time, according to UBB, the project will contribute to strengthening the participation of Romanian research in leading international networks in psychology and cognitive sciences.