Max Planck Institute for Human Development

Making decisions in environments with few choice options is easy. We select the action that results in the most valued outcome. Making decisions in more complex environments, where the same action can produce different outcomes in different conditions, is much harder. In such circumstances, we propose that accurate action selection relies on top-down control from the prelimbic and orbitofrontal cortices over striatal activity through distinct thalamostriatal circuits.

Applying insights from research on critical periods in early development, this chapter outlines a life-span research agenda on human plasticity and uses it as the conceptual foundation for a set of research hypotheses and open questions. Plasticity is defined as the capacity for lasting changes in brain structure associated with expansions in behavioral repertoire. As a complement to plasticity, flexibility refers to the instantiation and reconfiguration of the existing behavioral repertoire during periods of stability that are characterized by the absence of structural change. Animal work on critical periods in motor and sensory development substantiates three hypotheses that can serve as guideposts for research on plasticity in later age periods.

After 1945 it was not just Europe’s parliamentary buildings that promised to house democracy. Architecture, Democracy, and Emotions shows that even hotels in Turkey, Dutch shopping malls and Housing programs in the Soviet Union proposed new democratic attitudes and feelings. The book focuses on competing promises of consumer democracy, welfare democracy, and socialist democracy. Spanning from Turkey across Eastern and Western Europe to the United States, the chapters investigate the emotional politics of housing and representation.

What does a newborn perceive? How do children learn to deal with emotions? When and how do our personalities evolve? How do cognitive abilities change in adulthood? – The content areas of developmental psychology are more wide-ranging and accessible than is the case for most other fields of psychology. The textbook “Entwicklungspsychologie” – established by Rolf Oerter and Leo Montada – is regarded as the standard work in the field. Wolfgang Schneider and Ulman Lindenberger are the editors of its 8th edition.

Several theories of cognition distinguish between strategies that differ in the mental effort that their use requires. But how can the effort—or cognitive costs—associated with a strategy be conceptualized and measured?

What makes mind and body strong? Headlines like this are everywhere. Backache, breathlessness, skin rashes – we ascribe many physical complaints to emotional upheaval, too little mindfulness or long-term stress. But where do these concepts of psychosomatic medicine come from? This book provides the first overview of the history of psychosomatic medicine in Germany. Incisive chapters offer a panorama of the varieties of psychosomatics in the 20th century, while also portraying it as a form of medicine which saw itself as the more humane alternative to modern hi-tech, and therefore supposedly soulless, medicine.

Social learning is a fundamental element of human cognition. Learning from others facilitates the transmission of information that helps individuals and groups rapidly adjust to new environments and underlies adaptive cultural evolution. While basic human propensities for social learning are traditionally assumed to be species-universal recent empirical studies show that they vary between individuals and populations. Yet the causes of this variation remain poorly understood. Here we show that interdependence in everyday social and economic activities can strongly amplify social learning.