ELSC is delighted to announce that Dr. Raunak Basu has received a European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grant. These grants help scientists with a scientific track record showing great promise and an excellent research proposal to consolidate their independence.

How do you decide between a fancy restaurant far away downtown versus your local falafel store? You must consider the distance, context, taste, cost, and effort. Somehow, your brain juggles all these factors and finally makes a choice. Such decisions can be termed ‘spatial decisions’ and are the major focus of my research group. Spatial decision-making is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom and can often be a matter of life and death. However, we still don’t understand how such decisions are made at the behavioral level and even less so at the neural level.  Dr. Basu’s ERC-StG 2023, nicknamed ‘ChoiceSpace’, proposes to investigate how the brain makes spatial decisions using rats as an animal model. We hypothesize that to make such decisions, the brain makes a map of the environment that encodes all the information relevant for decision-making (We call it ‘task-relevant cognitive maps’), and this map is used to evaluate and compare the options and arrive at a decision. We propose to test this hypothesis by subjecting rats to various decision-making scenarios and subsequently analyzing which brain regions harbor such cognitive maps and how the decision is made. To achieve this, we will use custom-built recording systems that can record the activity of hundreds of neurons across multiple brain regions, and to further understand the nature of information encoded by these neurons, we will use state-of-the-art machine-learning based data analysis algorithms. Overall, this grant would help us understand the neural mechanisms of a critical yet unexplored cognitive phenomenon.