Roxana Zeraati receives Klaus Tschira Boost Fund
• Two-year grant to study how humans adapt their decision-making to changing environments.
• Moving beyond artificial experiments to capture more realistic behavior using gamified tasks.
• Potential relevance for disrupted or defective decision-making
Roxana Zeraati © Friedhelm Albrecht / University of Tübingen
Roxana Zeraati of the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics has been awarded the Klaus Tschira Boost Fund. This funding will enable her to investigate over a two-year period how humans learn about the dynamics of their environment and adjust their decisions in response to changing conditions.
So far, studies of human decision-making typically use artificial settings, with short, repeated trials, offering only a limited number of moments in which participants can make decisions. “These experiments do not fully capture the dynamic nature of real-world decisions,” said Zeraati. She aims to go beyond that by studying decision-making during foraging, a natural behavioral process shared among different species. In particular, she will use gamified tasks in which participants can continuously interact with a changing environment. For example, players might act as a pirate searching for treasure across multiple islands, choosing at any time where to explore and when to move, while resources appear, disappear, or shift in value.
Possible significance for dysfunctional decision-making
This design will allow Zeraati to explore in a naturalistic setting how humans learn about the nature and pace of changing circumstances, and how they adjust their decisions in response. The approach can also have important implications for cases in which people make decisions that they might later regret. “Behavioral ‘addictions’ such as gambling or social media usage can distort how people perceive the nature of their environments and affect their decisions,” said Zeraati. In the case of social media, for example, the ability to judge a good moment to stop doomscrolling may be impaired. Zeraati’s work could help uncover the mechanisms behind these difficulties and potentially inform methods of amelioration.
The Klaus Tschira Boost Fund is joint program by the the Germany-based foundation Klaus Tschira Stiftung and Guidance, Skills & Opportunities for Researchers e. V., offering flexible funding and professional development to excellent early career researchers. It provides 120,000 Euros over a period of 2 years as a first step towards scientific independence and leadership.
