Stay the course or change direction? How humans handle changes
“The Adaptive Mind” project involving TU Darmstadt is awarded funding as a Cluster of Excellence
2025/05/22
How can we use computer models to understand changes in human behaviour? Researchers at TU Darmstadt will be investigating this and other questions in the future in the new Cluster of Excellence, “The Adaptive Mind” (TAM). The application submitted by TU Darmstadt and its research partners to the prestigious Excellence Strategy from the German federal and state governments has now overcome some strong competition and has been selected for funding.
Humans have an unparalleled ability to handle change: The human eye can adapt to the brightness of our surroundings, irrespective of whether we are standing on the beach at midday or enjoying a moonless night. People don’t forget how to ride a bike even though our bodies constantly change throughout our lives, and we are able to handle different liquids, from water to honey. However, this ability to adapt is still out of the reach of robots to this day. Humans sometimes respond to such changes in conditions by remaining stable and other times by adapting to them. This requires a great deal of flexibility so that we can survive in a dynamic and uncertain world.
But how does the human mind decide when to use which strategy? What is the balance between stability and adaptation? And what happens when this adaptation process fails? Researchers from various different disciplines will be investigating these questions in the TAM Cluster of Excellence in the future. The applicants are the Justus Liebig University Gießen, TU Darmstadt and Philipps University Marburg. Other participants in the project are the Goethe University Frankfurt and the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies (FIAS).
A revolutionary approach
Professor Constantin Rothkopf, TAM spokesperson at TU Darmstadt, is delighted that the German Research Foundation (DFG) has awarded funding to the project as a Cluster of Excellence. “We are extremely pleased that our strong team of scientists will contribute to a field of research that promises to revolutionise how we understand human perception, thought, decision making, actions, and learning using computational models,” he says.
The TAM project aims to decode the universal principles behind human adaptability. This topic is currently being investigated in many academic fields – not just in the areas of cognitive science, neuroscience, and psychology but also in research on learning robots or the training of neural networks. This is why experts from the fields of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotics are also involved in the cluster project.
Spectacular success and tragic limits
The findings from the project will be integrated into computer models that can imitate, predict and explain both the spectacular successes and also tragic limits of the human mind. This will have an impact, on the one hand, on basic research by enabling the development of algorithms for behavioural adaptation that could also flow into the development of safe AI and robot technology, while it will enable us, on the other hand, to better understand deficits in adaptive behaviour that may influence our mental health.
Researchers from the fields of cognitive science and artificial intelligence at TU Darmstadt are contributing their outstanding expertise to this project. TU Darmstadt is one of the few places where the “twin scientific fields” of artificial intelligence and cognitive science are imagined, investigated, and enacted together. These two highly topical and important fields of research have been developed in a responsible, strategic, and sustainable way at TU Darmstadt. Some of the researchers involved in this scientific consortium can thus be found working in the Centre for Cognitive Science and the Hesse Center for Artificial Intelligence (hessian.ai). The State of Hesse funded a predecessor project for four years starting in April 2021 and provided total funding of 7.4 million euros.
About the excellence strategy of the federal and state governments
To further strengthen the international competitiveness of research at German universities, the federal and state governments have established the Excellence Strategy as a funding programme. The key objective of the Excellence Strategy is to strengthen top-level research in areas that are internationally competitive, to institutionally strengthen German universities, and to advance the development of the German higher education system.
To this end, the Excellence Strategy comprises two separate but intertwined funding lines. The “Clusters of Excellence” funding line, coordinated by the German Research Foundation (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft – DFG) provides project-based funding for internationally competitive research areas at German universities. The “Universities of Excellence” funding line, coordinated by the German Science and Humanities Council (Wissenschaftsrat – WR), is designed to fund institutional strategies that promise to strengthen universities as a whole and create outstanding framework conditions for excellent research.
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