Grants for Research Regarding Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences

Grants for Research Regarding Cognitive and Behavioral Sciences is sponsored by The Foundation (specific name not provided in snippet, but a private foundation context is implied). This grant from a private foundation supports research in cognitive and behavioral sciences. While broad, projects focusing on the cognitive aspects of AI literacy, how students learn AI concepts, or behavioral impacts of AI in education could be relevant.

Future unclear for U.S. federal funding of cognitive science | The Transmitter: Neuroscience News and Perspectives Fragile future: The National Science Foundation budget contains no money for its Directorate for Social, Behavioral and Economic Sciences—typically a major source of funding for those fields, as well as cognitive neuroscience.

Illustration by Sam Schuman / Source: Steven Puetzer / Getty Images Add us as a Preferred Source on Google Set us as a Preferred Source to see The Transmitter more prominently in your Google Search results. Future remains uncertain for U.S. federal funding of behavioral, cognitive science 26 August 2026 | 5 min read https://doi. org/10.

53053/VJTI5114 https://doi. org/10. 53053/VJTI5114 - opens a new tab And it’s unclear if any future funding calls will include the SBE, which ordinarily funds more than 60 percent of social and psychological research, including cognitive neuroscience research, in the United States.

In April, President Trump’s budget request slashed funding for the NSF by more than half and allocated no money for the SBE. Soon after, the NSF’s own proposed budget said it would close the SBE directorate and move any of its grants that “align with Administration priorities” and its support staff to other parts of the agency.

Even though the SBE has not been officially shut down, its future is murky: Hiring has been frozen, and program directors whose 2-to-4-year stints are ending are not being replaced, says a former program director in the SBE who requested anonymity to speak candidly. So, even if money does become available, there won’t be enough staff to put together a solicitation quickly or to manage the applications.

“We want that directorate to exist so that when the tides turn some point in the future, the infrastructure is still there to support SBE, and then hopefully the funding will follow,” says Wendy Naus , executive director of the Consortium of Social Science Associations, a nonprofit organization that advocates for the social and behavioral sciences.

“But as soon as SBE as its own thing no longer exists, it’s going to be nearly impossible to bring it back. ” or decades, the U.S. Congress has specified only the overall budget of the NSF in its appropriation bills.

It provides more details in additional reports about how it expects the money to be spent but has largely refrained from directing the NSF on how to divvy up its budget, leaving that decision to the scientific experts the agency employs, says Juliane Baron , executive director of the Federation of Associations in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, a nonprofit coalition of brain science societies.

But that approach has now made it possible for the NSF to eliminate one of its directorates based on the president’s budget request, and without community or congressional input. “Congress has said for years, ‘Don’t mess with SBE. ’” Naus says.

So even though “we think NSF has some authority to do this, they are not complying with congressional intent. ” The SBE has been part of the NSF since 1991 and contains programs in fields as diverse as anthropology, economics, linguistics and developmental science. The SBE is an important funder for basic cognitive neuroscience studies, says Sepideh Sadaghiani , professor of psychology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

The U.S. National Institutes of Health and private funders are often more interested in cognitive neuroscience questions that already have clear clinical relevance, she says. “Just generically, how does the brain work in its basic form? That’s hard to get funding for, in my experience.

” Last year, the SBE began hosting the Collaborative Research in Computational Neuroscience program, a joint effort between the NSF, the National Institutes of Health, the U.S. Department of Energy and the governments of Spain, France, Germany, Japan and Israel.

The empty budget for the SBE also means there is no money earmarked for the computational neuroscience program from that directorate, but other parts of NSF and the program’s other partners could contribute money for a funding opportunity. “I’m more optimistic” about the future of that program, the former SBE program director says, “partially because it’s more aligned with administration goals around the future of AI.

” Another reason for neuroscientists to be optimistic, the former program director says, is that the line in the NSF’s budget request about moving grants that align with the administration’s priorities explicitly mentions behavioral and cognitive science. However, breaking up the SBE directorate makes it less likely that an application will land in front of a reviewer with relevant expertise, they add.

The uncertainty at the SBE has caused one visual psychophysicist to “mostly shut down” his lab. Rhea Eskew , professor of psychology at Northeastern University, who studies color detection, had a three-year grant from the SBE that ended on 1 July. There have been no relevant NSF funding calls for him to apply to, and few private sources of funding for his work.

As a result, he says, he shut down his experimental work and laid off his laboratory technician and most of his undergraduate research assistants. “It’s a huge amount of work to submit a grant proposal, and nobody wants to be doing that if they think there is essentially zero chance of it being funded,” Eskew says. “So I’m hoping for better days ahead and waiting for a while to see what the future holds.

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