Projects

Project NEIS is concerned with the development of self-regulatory skills – the ability to perform goal-oriented behavior – in children aged between 5 and 8 years.

Children have difficulty understanding negation until around the age of five or six, and even adults process negative sentences less efficiently than affirmative ones. This project investigates whether these difficulties are related to the development of children’s cognitive abilities. To address this question, German-speaking children aged four to ten years and adult control participants will be tested using comprehension tasks, sentence-completion tasks, and eye-tracking experiments.

The project NeuroBind investigates the neural bases of the attachment system in children with different attachment styles using neuroimaging techniques (structural and functional magnetic resonance imaging). To activate their attachment system, children are shown different attachment relevant pictures and are asked to imagine themselves in secure and dangerous social situations. Correlations between brain activity and emotional reactions in response to those specific social situations are analyzed.

The project PaSS evaluates the social validity of school-based prevention programmes that aim to foster social skills and reduce aggressive behaviour.

As neuroscientific knowledge about brain function accumulates, it becomes increasingly important to derive a set of overarching general principles about how the human brain works. One promising approach is the concept of predictive coding, which posits that the brain functions like a prediction machine; internal models in the brain predict future states against which incoming […]

This project evaluates the potential of predictions generated by students to improve their learning. Further, it investigates the mechanisms that determine its success and asks whether there are age-related differences in its effectiveness.

The PROMPT project is developing an evidence-based, child-friendly prototype of a learning planner application to support students in self-regulated learning with digital media. The final version of the prototype will be made freely available for widespread use.

The RABE 2 project investigates the persistence and psychosocial consequences of learning difficulties in school from primary school to early adulthood. The study focuses on the risks and effects of learning difficulties, but also looks at the resources of those affected.

The project ReAL examines the development of children’s reading and calculation skills over the course of elementary school, using a combination of behavioral and neurophysiological (EEG, MRI) measures.

Resilience represents a theoretically important factor in talent development. We investigate this relation by using a diary study in which (particularly gifted) primary school children report how they experience stress and how they cope with it.