Starting Grants 2025: Examples of projects

False memories: a tool of survival and reproduction

Autobiographical memory is highly malleable: simple conversation can reshape memories or even plant entirely false memories of events that never happened. This malleability is a universal feature of the human condition. Cognitive psychologists tend to be preoccupied with memory accuracy and refer to deviations from accuracy as errors, distortions and failures.

However, newly funded research led by Gilian Murphy is going to explore a radically different possibility: that the construction of false memories is functional and adaptive in and of itself. For her, memory did not evolve to act as a recording device. It evolved under the same selective pressures as anything else in the natural world: survival and reproduction.

Murphy's research suggests that, in many situations, there may be a functional and adaptive tendency to sacrifice accuracy in favour of another outcome, such as improved wellbeing or social cohesion. To this end, she will develop a functional account of false memories to test the downstream benefits of such memories. This will involve testing experimentally how memory malleability may allow us to be happier with ourselves and integrate more effectively within our social groups. In contrast, she will also explore situations where memory accuracy may need to be prioritised for survival-related information. The study will also explore how we can harness functional false memories in an ethical way and will culminate in a new model of false memories.

The way we think about human memory could be completely transformed by this research, which would redefine our bugs as features.

Gilian Murphy is a senior lecturer in the University College Cork's School of Applied Psychology, where she leads the Everyday Cognition Lab. Gilian is a former Fulbright Scholar and is a Funded Investigator at Lero, the Research Ireland Centre for Software.

• Researcher: Gilian Murphy
• Project: Functional, Reliable and Adaptive Memory Errors (FRAME)
• Host Institution: University College Cork - National University of Ireland, Cork (IE)
• ERC funding: € 1.5 million for 5 years

Improving adult ADHD diagnosis

The world is witnessing a sharp rise in adult attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) diagnoses, especially after the COVID-19 pandemic. Traditionally viewed as a disorder affecting children, many adults now seek help for ADHD-related symptoms such as difficulty concentrating, forgetfulness, restlessness, or impulsive behaviour. This shift raises important questions: Are these adult symptoms truly the same as those found in children with ADHD, or do they represent other mental health conditions with similar signs?

Diagnosing adult ADHD accurately is difficult due to overlapping symptoms with other mental health issues and the absence of precise screening tools.

The project AT-TENSION, led by Kelli Lehto at the University of Tartu, seeks to tackle this challenge by combining psychology, genetics, and data science. The project aims to understand the genetic and environmental factors contributing to adult ADHD symptoms. It will study data from five large biobanks to explore genetic links with other mental conditions and examine how factors such as stress, lifestyle, and the pandemic impact ADHD symptoms across different ages and genders.

A key part of the project is developing a new screening tool that uses data from personal reports, electronic health records, genetic data and machine learning to improve the accuracy of ADHD diagnoses in adults.

Kelli Lehto is associate professor at the Institute of Genomics, University of Tartu.

• Researcher: Kelli Lehto
• Project: Attention on inattention: Dissecting the causal mechanisms of adult ADHD features (AT-TENSION)
• Host Institution: University of Tartu (IE)
• ERC funding: € 1.5 million for 5 years

Redefining aging and age-related diseases

Aging is a complicated process that happens in the body, involving changes at many levels - from tiny molecules to larger organs. Even though diseases related to aging greatly affect our lives, it is unclear how small changes in our cells cause our organs to lose their function over time.

Several limitations still persist: from studies focused on animal models, limiting the insights we can gain - as their bodies aren't exactly like human bodies - to research on humans investigating only a few organs easy to examine, missing the bigger picture. Furthermore, it's challenging to separate normal aging changes from the changes caused by diseases because we lack the baselines defining healthy aging, making harder to understand whether certain changes are caused by aging or by a disease.

To better tackle these issues, André Rendeiro will use large datasets of human tissues along with advanced machine learning techniques to gain a clearer picture of what happens in our bodies as we age. His project will not only offer a novel, comprehensive view of how tissues change with age. It will also question the traditional notion that age-related diseases are simply caused by cellular dysfunctions aiming to redefine our understanding of the onset of age-associated diseases.

André Rendeiro is a Principal Investigator at the CeMM Research Center for Molecular Medicine of the Austrian Academy of Sciences and a Research Group Leader at the Ludwig Boltzmann Institute for Network Medicine at the University of Vienna. He leads a research group that uses computational and molecular methods to study human aging and pathology.

• Researcher: André Rendeiro
• Project: A quantitative tissue architecture framework to understand human aging and disease (QUANTAGE)
• Host Institution: CeMM - Research Center for Molecular Medicine (AT)

• ERC funding: € 1.5 million for 5 years

The sensational science of artificial touch

Yasemin Vardar is exploring one of our most complex senses: touch. Her research focuses on how tactile sensations arise when our skin interacts with surfaces, and how these sensations can be artificially recreated through wearable haptic technology. By advancing our understanding of this process, she is developing new ways to make artificial touch feel more natural and realistic.

The aim of the research is to replace the tactile experience of any surface felt through bare fingertips with new, desired sensations. This involves altering the way natural surfaces feel by artificially overlaying tactile qualities such as roughness, softness, or warmth. These overlays are produced by applying combinations of vibration, pressure, and temperature to the fingers.

To create these multisensory experiences and seamlessly combine them with our naturally felt sensations, Yasemin Vardar and her team will use recent data on finger-surface interactions to develop models that generate artificial touch signals.

The project seeks to deepen our understanding of the sense of touch by developing the first universal model for creating multisensory skin sensations. Through psychophysical experiments and machine learning, it will mathematically model how different touch sensations are linked to what we actually feel and how signals from various contact points on the skin can be combined.

The implications of this research extend across multiple disciplines. In medicine, it could inform the design of non-invasive prosthetic devices. In computer science, it could enable new forms of user interaction within mixed-reality environments. In psychology and neuroscience, it will enhance our knowledge of how multisensory stimuli influence perception. Ultimately, such advances could contribute to the development of next-generation interactive technologies, moving us towards a 'future without touchscreens', where any surface could provide personalised tactile feedback.

Yasemin Vardar is an Assistant Professor in the Cognitive Robotics Department at the Delft University of Technology, where she is leading the Haptic Interface Technology Group (HITLab).

• Researcher: Yasemin Vardar
• Project: Superimposing Model-Based Multisensory Touch Sensations on Everyday Surfaces (SuperTouch)
• Host Institution: Technische Universiteit Delft (NL)
• ERC funding: € 1.5 million for 5 years