Federal Project Grant Award Summary

The National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Multidisciplinary Activities awarded the University of Delaware $693,716 under the Social, Behavioral, and Economic Sciences program (CFDA 47.075) for research titled "Cognitive and Neural Representations of Visual Scenes." The award, effective July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2029, funds cognitive and neuroimaging research investigating how humans mentally represent surrounding space, objects, and scene layout to inform decision-making and behavior. The research employs two primary methodological approaches: (1) cognitive and neuroimaging experiments contrasting spatio-centric versus visuo-centric scene representation theories, and (2) development and extension of multivoxel pattern analysis (MVPA) techniques to decode neural correlates of extended spatial expanse and content. Additionally, the project deliverables include digitization and open-access archiving of historical photograph and drawing stimulus sets from pioneering scene-perception studies dating to the 1960s and 1970s, materials currently at risk of loss but valuable to the scientific research, educational, and museum communities.

The research offers comparative benchmarking of human scene understanding against artificial intelligence systems including image and language models, thereby advancing both cognitive neuroscience and AI evaluation methodologies. As a Project Grant within the NSF's basic research portfolio, this award supports fundamental scientific inquiry rather than applied commercial development or service delivery contracts.