Two ERC Advanced Grants for the University of Vienna

How democratic engagement emerges in adolescence

How do young people learn about politics in a world shaped by friends, social media, influencers, and algorithms? With the project SYNAPS social scientist Hajo G. Boomgaarden and his team investigate how 14- to 16-year-olds develop political interest, knowledge, and engagement through their everyday interactions offline and online. The project studies young people in Austrian schools and follows how political conversations, friendships, social media use, and digital information flows influence one another over time. It pays particular attention to inequalities, asking why some young people become politically engaged while others remain excluded or unheard. By combining surveys, interviews, social media data, participatory workshops, and computer simulations, SYNAPS will generate new insights into how democratic engagement emerges in adolescence. The project will also help educators, policymakers, and civil society actors design better ways to support inclusive youth participation in democracy. In doing so, SYNAPS offers a timely understanding of how the next generation becomes politically informed, connected, and active.

About Hajo G. Boomgaarden

Hajo G. Boomgaarden is Professor of Empirical Social Science Methods at the University of Vienna, where he co-leads the Computational Communication Lab. He also chairs the Board of Directors of Monitoring Electoral Democracy, a European research infrastructure initiative. In his research he focuses on political communication, public opinion, digital media, and computational social science. He has published widely on media effects, political knowledge and engagement, misinformation, social media, and networked communication.

Metrical Hierarchy in Music and Language

The human mind loves hierarchical structure. This shows up in linguistic syntax, musical harmony, social structures, and many other domains. Where did this come from, and do animals share it? Although hierarchical cognition is recognized as a key aspect of the human mind, its evolution has remained puzzling and only few parallels in animal communication have been found. METRA's central proposal is that metrical rhythms, as found in speech, music, and dance, represent a simpler kind of hierarchical tree than in syntax: trees built in time. This simpler structure is likely to have parallels in animal cognition and communication.

In METRA, Tecumseh Fitch combines  theoretical approaches from music, metrical phonology, and evolutionary biology in a comparative context, and studies not just humans but birds, primates and sea lions. The research draws on five complementary methods: EEG recordings during speech, music, and dance; animal cognition studies; cross-linguistic speech research using electroglottography (EGG); corpus analysis of animal communication alongside human song and poetry; and studies of cross-modal synchronization between vocalization and dynamic visual displays. METRA will catapult scientific understanding of rhythmic cognition to a new level, providing new insights into hierarchical cognition, a central aspect of the human mind.

About Tecumseh Fitch

Tecumseh Fitch is a cognitive biologist and professor at the Department of Behavioral and Cognitive Biology at the University of Vienna's Faculty of Life Sciences. He studies the biology and evolution of cognition and communication in vertebrates, with a particular focus on the evolution of language, music, and speech. After his PhD in Cognitive Science at Brown University and postdoctoral work at MIT and Harvard, he lectured at Harvard and St Andrews before moving to Vienna in 2009. After receiving his first ERC Advanced Grant (2009), he has now been awarded his second. Tecumseh Fitch is a Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences.