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…
