Roxana Zeraati Receives Klaus Tschira Boost Fund

Why It Matters

The study bridges a gap between laboratory precision and real‑world behavior, offering insights that could improve interventions for behavioral addictions and inform design of digital platforms.

Key Takeaways

• Zeraati receives €120k (~$131k) two-year grant.
• Research uses gamified foraging tasks to mimic real-world decisions.
• Study targets adaptive decision-making in dynamic environments.
• Findings could inform treatment of gambling and social‑media addictions.

Pulse Analysis

The Klaus Tschira Boost Fund, a joint initiative of Germany’s Klaus Tschira Stiftung and Guidance, Skills & Opportunities for Researchers, has awarded Roxana Zeraati a two‑year grant of €120,000—roughly $131,000. The program is designed to accelerate scientific independence for promising early‑career scholars by providing flexible financing and professional development. In the competitive European research ecosystem, such seed funding is rare but increasingly vital for interdisciplinary projects that sit at the intersection of neuroscience, psychology, and computational modeling.

Zeraati’s project tackles a long‑standing limitation in decision‑making research: the reliance on highly artificial, trial‑based experiments that fail to capture the fluidity of everyday choices. By deploying gamified foraging scenarios—such as a pirate navigating shifting treasure islands—participants interact continuously with a changing environment, allowing researchers to track how learning rates and risk assessments evolve over time. This naturalistic paradigm bridges laboratory precision with ecological validity, offering richer datasets for computational models that aim to predict human behavior in real‑world contexts.

The potential payoff extends beyond basic science. Adaptive decision‑making mechanisms are disrupted in behavioral addictions like gambling and compulsive social‑media use, where users misread environmental cues and persist in harmful patterns. Insights from Zeraati’s work could inform therapeutic interventions, digital‑wellness design, and policy frameworks that mitigate regret‑laden choices. As tech platforms increasingly embed gamified feedback loops, understanding the neural and cognitive underpinnings of dynamic decision processes becomes a strategic asset for both clinicians and industry leaders.