JSMF Opportunity Awards

Overview

<div>JSMF is internationally recognized for supporting research on cognition and behavior; most recently, through the Understanding Human Cognition (UHC) Scholar Awards. JSMF suspended the Scholar Awards in 2019 and undertook an exploration of the new priorities for the foundation’s support for the fields of cognitive science, cognitive psychology and developmental science with the intent of identifying a funding initiative that would be forward looking and responsive to contemporary questions, while building on JSMF’s history. JSMF is announcing new grant guidelines for the Understanding Human Cognition program. The foundation believes the time is right to advance the understanding of human cognition and behavior via scientific approach that departs from what is traditionally pursued in academic cognitive psychology/cognitive neuroscience laboratories. Much of the current understanding of behavior is derived from experimental laboratory work that makes substantive conceptual and methodological assumptions during task selection and data acquisition. Cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience experiments are typically pursued in artificial environments with subjects drawn from narrowly defined populations performing tasks assumed to be valid proxies for real cognition and behavior.</div> <div>.</div> <div>As a result, these experiments may not reflect the naturally occurring, free-flowing behaviors humans engage in while carrying out meaningful actions in the context of their everyday lives. It is reasonable to ask how much has been missed or ignored because researchers’ experimental designs are based on pre-selected and specific aspects of cognition and behavior deemed to be of interest prior to the study. What more might be learned by challenging preconceived notions and common assumptions about cognition and behavior by advancing new theories and by using methods where it is possible to observe what behavior looks like in every day, real-world, dynamic contexts? With the Opportunity Awards, JSMF is seeking to fund projects leading to new conceptual and empirical studies of cognition and behavior that</div> <ul> <li>embrace complexity,</li> <li>recognize the dynamic nature of action</li> <li>are situated in real work contexts</li> <li>cross levels of analysis, and</li> <li>unite traditionally separate domains of inquiry (e.g. vision and speech)</li> </ul> <div>.</div> <div>JSMF is encouraging researchers to pursue important questions using conceptual and methodological approaches that takes seriously the trajectories, biological and experiential, contributing to the ongoing development of cognition and behavior occurring across the lifespan. Individual projects need not cover the full human life span but the reasons for focusing on specific age ranges for study should be fully articulated. Research plans that only propose to document task performance of subjects at different ages (e.g. comparing 15-year-old subjects to 60-year-old subjects) are not responsive to the call for proposals.</div> <div>.</div> <div>The new JSMF Opportunity Awards provide up to $250,000 in seed funds expendable over a flexible time period (between 2 and 4 years) as needed by researchers to design and carry out studies motivated by questioning, revisiting, or re-examining the current state of academic knowledge of human cognition and behavior using a dynamic, context-sensitive lens. New theories, tools and techniques have opened myriad opportunities for rigorously studying cognition and behavior as individuals engage in ongoing real-world activities in everyday life contexts in ways not previously possible.  JSMF is particularly interested in supporting applications from researchers who may not now be using the approaches described in this call for proposals, but who want to adopt this approach as an experimentally coherent way of conceptualizing, designing, and pursuing an understanding of human cognition and behavior.</div>