News

Congratulations to Prof. Emanual Ceva, Prof. Julien Deonna, Prof. Eva Pool, and Prof. David Sander - and all the researchers involved in the respective projects - for the funding they received through the first call for proposals from the Foundation for the University of Geneva (FUNIGE).

Prof Eva Pool has received a FUNIGE grant for her project “MIND-SR: Modelling Individual Differences in Social Reward”. This project, co-led by Yvain Tisserand, will investigate the neuropsychological mechanisms underlying individual differences in sensitivity to social reward. The team will develop virtual humans capable of adapting their emotional expressions in real time and will recruit 300 healthy adults to interact with them in Virtual Reality. Using self-report, behavioral, and physiological measures, the project will quantify each participant’s sensitivity to social reward and examine how this variability relates to mental health, including social anxiety and autism.

Prof. Julien Deonna and Prof. David Sander are part of the TRUST project, coordinated by Prof. Emanuela Ceva of the Department of Political Science and International Relations at the University of Geneva.

The TRUST project—Trustworthy Institutions for Trusting Citizens—is based on the observation of a crisis of trust in political, scientific, and social institutions. It aims to better understand in which cases public mistrust is justified and how to strengthen institutional reliability through best practices in accountability. An interdisciplinary team will develop analytical tools, training programs for public officials, and civic education activities. At the heart of the project is the creation of the Institutional Trust Institute (ITI), a center of excellence dedicated to the study and promotion of trustworthy institutions, as well as to fostering critical citizenship.

Professor David Sander has also obtained funding for a project titled Knowledge as Reward: Brain Bases of Curiosity and Olfactory and Monetary Rewards, co-led by Martin Gaudré, Dr. Yoann Stussi, and Dr. Sylvain Delplanque.

The project focuses on how humans are inherently curious and often seek knowledge even when it offers no immediate benefit. Recent evidence indicates that learning new information is intrinsically rewarding, suggesting that curiosity itself may function as a form of reward. But does the human brain respond to knowledge in a similar way it processes more traditional rewards? This project will use functional neuroimaging to directly compare brain responses to the anticipation and consumption of interesting knowledge, pleasant smells, and money. By doing so, we aim to identify whether curiosity shares common neural representations with olfactory and monetary rewards, thereby advancing our understanding of why humans are motivated to seek information.