With the Opportunity Awards, JSMF is seeking to fund projects leading to new conceptual and empirical studies of cognition and behavior that:

• Recognize the dynamic nature of cognition and behavior,
• Are situated in real world contexts,
• Cross levels of analysis,
• Unite traditionally separate domains of inquiry (e.g., vision and speech),
• Embrace complexity, and
• Consider how behavior is influenced by interactions among individuals.

JSMF is encouraging researchers to pursue new questions using conceptual and methodological approaches that take seriously the trajectories, biological and experiential, and contribute to the ongoing development of cognition and behavior occurring across the lifespan. Individual projects need not cover the full human life span but the reasons for focusing on specific age ranges for study should be fully articulated. Research plans that only propose to document task performance of subjects at different ages (e.g., comparing 15-year-old subjects to 60-year-old subjects) are not responsive to the call for proposals.

The JSMF Opportunity Awards provide up to $250,000 in seed funds expendable over a flexible time period (between 2 and 4 years) as needed by researchers to design and carry out new studies motivated by questioning, revisiting, or re-examining the current state of academic knowledge of human cognition and behavior using a dynamic, context-sensitive lens. New theories, tools, and techniques have opened myriad opportunities for rigorously studying cognition and behavior as individuals engage in ongoing real-world activities in everyday life contexts in ways not previously possible. This call for proposals is focused on applications from researchers who are not currently using the approaches described in this call for proposals, but who want to adopt this approach as an experimentally coherent way of conceptualizing, designing, and pursuing an understanding of human cognition and behavior. Opportunity awards will not provide additional support for already established research programs. Such proposals will be triaged out early in the review process.

Priority will be given to applicants requesting funds:

• To support collaboration or to obtain training that allows new theories and new tools to alter the conduct of ongoing research.
• To provide a researcher with supported time while acquiring the new skills and knowledge to alter future research design.
• To pilot or test novel experimental approaches and to allow laboratories primarily using artificial laboratory constrained tasks to explore behavioral studies with more natural free flowing behaviors. To refine and extend the temporal dimension of data acquisition allowing for more dynamic assessments of how behavior unfolds over time.
• To diversify and expand study populations.

The deadline for applications is April 1, 2022, 15:59 CDT (20:59 UTC). All materials must be submitted electronically through the specified process

Applications must be submitted by an eligible institution (501c3, government instrumentality, or foreign equivalent) on behalf of researchers with full-time faculty positions or equivalent.

In case of interest for further information, please contact frecerca.internacional(ELIMINAR)@sjd.es