27 January 2015

New Grant: Finding Perspective: Determining the embodiment of perspectival experience

The Volkswagen Foundation's European Platform for Life Sciences, Mind Sciences, and the Humanities has awarded 2,9mill DKK to the project Finding Perspective: Determining the embodiment of perspectival experience. From this amount 0,9 mill DKK have been awarded to Adrian Alsmith. The project starts in March 2015 and will have a duration of 3 years.

Adrian Alsmith is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Center for Subjectivity Research.

The purpose of the “European Platform” funding initiative is to promote networking among young European researchers investigating at the boundaries of the cognitive neurosciences and the humanities and social sciences.

EUROPEAN PLATFORM

Project

Perspective is a basic structural feature of spatial perception: we perceive the world not only with our bodies, but also from our bodies. The FINDING PERSPECTIVE project is built around two central hypotheses about the relation between perspectival experience and bodily experience: (1) that perspectival experience is embodied insofar as bodily experience and perspectival experience are mutually influential; and (2) that both bodily and perspectival experiential phenomena are richly differentiated, such that different forms of each structure one another in a variety of ways. Testing these hypotheses will enable FINDING PERSPECTIVE to systematically investigate the structure of embodied perspectival experience with an unprecedented level of precision. Using an unparalleled range of methods to investigate embodied perspectival experience, ranging from state of the art virtual reality technologies, psychophysics, brain imaging, to phenomenological and conceptual analysis, FINDING PERSPECTIVE will provide the first comprehensive theory of embodied perspectival experience. FINDING PERSPECTIVE thus promises to provide new insights into the nature of spatial perception, embodied action, and the relation between self, body, and (the natural and virtual) world.

Project leader

Adrian Alsmith
Department of Media, Cognition and Communication
Center for Subjectivity Research
University of Copenhagen

Project Partners

Prof. Matthew Longo
Department of Psychological Sciences
Birkbeck
University of London

Dr. Christophe Lopez
Laboratory of Integrative and Adaptive Neuroscience
CNRS - Marseille

Dr. Betty Mohler
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
Tübingen

Dr. Hong Yu Wong
Werner Reichard Center for Integrative Neurosciences
Tübingen