Four members of Chapman University’s Institute for Interdisciplinary Brain and Behavioral Sciences were awarded a grant of just less than $230,000 to study “Is consciousness necessary for action initiation?”
Chapman assistant professors Uri Maoz and Aaron Schurger, post-doctoral researcher Tomáš Dominik, post-baccalaureate researcher Martha Shaw ’21 and two other researchers will work on the two-year project.
They will use state-of-the-art technology at the Brain Institute to research what humans can and can’t do without consciousness. In particular, they will test to what extent humans can, under some conditions, respond to environmental conditions like automatons.
The grant is from Templeton World Charity Foundation’s Accelerating Research on Consciousness Initiative.
