Christian Keysers, professor of Social Neuroscience at the UvA, has also received an ERC Advanced Grant. He submitted his grant application from the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NIN).

An Advanced Grant amounts to a maximum of 2.5 million euros per project and is awarded on the basis of the scientific excellence of both the researcher and the research proposal.

The funded projects

Dr Maria Aloni, associate professor of Logic and Language: Cognitive Biases in Reasoning and Interpretation (NIHILPLUS)

In everyday life, people often reason differently from what classical logic prescribes. This is usually explained as a form of “hidden rationality”: people extract extra meaning from a sentence because speakers and listeners want to understand each other as efficiently as possible. This would be the result of implicit rules for cooperative communication. Aloni proposes a different, thoughtprovoking idea: many of these additional meanings do not arise because we are so rational, but precisely because our brains find certain forms of reasoning difficult. Unconsciously, we choose the easiest mental route.

Take a parent who tells a child: ‘You may do your homework or go to the beach.’ According to logic, this only implies that at least one of the two options is allowed. Yet most people understand this as: you may go to the beach and you may do your homework – a genuine free choice. Formally this is not correct, but it feels completely selfevident.

Aloni investigates three systematic thinking preferences - socalled cognitive biases - that shape our reasoning and language comprehension. She develops new logical models to describe these biases precisely and tests her ideas in experiments with both adults and children. This should clarify how large the gap is between formal logic and everyday reasoning. Such knowledge can help to improve communication and education and, for example, make legal and AI systems better aligned with how people really think.

Prof. Arnon Kater, professor of Internal Medicine, in particular Translational Haematology: Signalling and Powering Anti-Cancer Responses in T Cells (SPARC)

Kater investigates why T cells that should eliminate cancer lose their function in many patients. Modern immunotherapies, such as CAR T cell therapy, can cure some forms of leukaemia, but still work insufficiently in most other cancers.

At present, much research focuses on improving how T cells are activated. The prevailing view is that tumours do not sufficiently activate these cells and deprive them of essential nutrients. As a result, virtually all current immunotherapies try to exploit the existing T cell activation pathway more effectively.

Kater proposes a fundamentally different explanation. According to his research, cancer cells continuously drive T cells with an activation signal that would normally fade after a short time. Because this signal remains switched on, T cells become dysregulated. As a consequence, the mitochondria, the cell’s energy powerhouses, become progressively damaged, preventing T cells from dividing properly, surviving long enough, and ultimately from effectively clearing cancer cells.

Kater’s research shows that this process is reversible. By activating T cells through an alternative pathway, their mitochondrial energy production and function can be restored, also in models of solid tumours such as colorectal cancer. With the SPARC project, Kater aims to unravel how this derailed signalling arises and to translate this knowledge into a new generation of immunotherapies that can restore T cell function in many more types of cancer.

Advanced Grant for Christian Keysers

Christian Keysers, professor of Social Neuroscience at the UvA, has received an ERC Advanced Grant for his project The Neuro-Computational Mechanisms of the Aversion to Harm Others (HarmAversion). He will conduct the research at the Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience (NiN), where he leads the research group ‘The Empathic Brain’.

Read more about Keysers’ project