Amongst the awards is one to Dr Konstantinos Tsetsos, Senior Lecturer in the School of Psychological Science, who has been awarded £1.7m to continue research into how humans process information when making decisions.

The ERC Consolidator Grant will fund a study into the dynamics of attribute weighting when making choices, and in particular what are the mechanisms we use in daily decisions involving multi-attribute trade-offs. For example, how much flavour do we sacrifice in pursuit of a healthier food option? Or how many extra minutes of commuting are we willing to sacrifice in order to make a more sustainable transport choice?

Dr Tsetsos said: “Every day, we make decisions by balancing competing factors like health, effort, and financial reward. However, the neural processes that determine the relative importance of these factors remain poorly understood.

“In this project, we will use advanced neuroimaging techniques to shed light on these mechanisms, which will enable us to understand, at a deeper mechanistic level, what promotes preference stability and what drives preference change. Insights from this project will be valuable to clinicians seeking to understand pathological preference variability or persistence; and to policy makers probing whether specific consumer trade-offs are stable or plastic.”

Read about the other projects supported on the University news pages