Research Training Group (Minigraduiertenkolleg) Grounding Self and Agency

In addition to educational opportunities provided by the GTC, we have established a new interdisciplinary Research Training Group (RTG, Graduiertenkolleg) at the CIN on 'Grounding Self and Agency'. This RTG brings together cognitive scientists and philosophers in order to promote scientific exchange and foster the next generation of researchers who will investigate problems at the interface between the humanities and the social sciences.

Scientific questions are tackled at different levels simultaneously: from the neural and behavioural level to the representational and phenomenological. In order to guarantee successful interdisciplinary discourse, pairs (tandems) of philosophers and neuroscientists will supervise projects. Furthermore, a pair of students from each discipline will cooperate in every project. The CIN's financial support has made it possible to start up this new RTG. Current tandem projects include:

• Was it me - the neurocognitive and philosophical basis of agency.
• Being somewhere - spatial contents of self-representations and their role in spatial cognition.
• Neural correlates of non-verbal metacognitive skills in human and non-human primates.

In future we plan to expand the number of interdisciplinary doctoral projects and, building on our current experience, in the foreseeable future we will file a proposal for an RTG to be funded by the German Research Council. .

Contact: Prof. Dr. Sabine A. Döring