Projects

The project NEDA investigates the relationship between the development of reading and spelling skills and the development of neural auditory processing in elementary school children.

Children, like adults, often have difficulty processing linguistic negation. However, these difficulties can be reduced or even eliminated when negation is presented in an appropriate context. Our project therefore examines how different contextual factors affect children’s processing and production of negation, with the aim of identifying the specific factors that facilitate these processes.

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.

Some students read literary texts as if they were expository texts: limiting themselves to extracting bits of information, without immersing themselves into textworlds or responding affectively or aesthetically to the texts. We call this a “limitation to the propositional textbase”. In our ProFix study, we are working with 400 students from Germany and Switzerland and try to understand who is afflicted by this phenomenon.

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.