Projects

Head: Markus Werkle-Bergner
The overarching objective of this project is to understand how the dynamic interplay of maturation, personal experiences, and senescence drives and affects plastic changes on neural and behavioral levels across the lifespan. [more]

Head: Myriam C. Sander
In the context of a Minerva Research Group, this project examines how we remember and why we remember less as we grow older. Our memories are encoded in specific distributed patterns of neural activity that can be regarded as memory fingerprints. The researchers investigate how aging affects the distinctiveness and similarity of memory representations during memory formation, maintenance, and retrieval. [more]

Head: Martin J. Dahl
In this project, we use neuroimaging techniques to examine how brain changes in older adulthood are associated with neurodegenerative diseases and age-related cognitive decline. Our particular focus is on certain neurotransmitters, so-called neuromodulators. [more]

Heads: Julia Delius & Sandra Düzel
During the 20th century, average life expectancy nearly doubled. More and more individuals in current cohorts of older individuals experience additional years of life between the ages of 70 and 100+. This project makes use of interdisciplinary longitudinal studies to investigate aging. [more]

Heads: Yana Fandakova & Elisabeth Wenger
This project addresses the questions of whether and how plasticity contributes to development across the lifespan. Special attention is paid to the relationship between neural and behavioral manifestations of plasticity. [more]

Head: Viktor Müller
In everyday life, people often need to coordinate their actions with each other (e.g., walking together at a set pace, playing a team sport, dancing, playing music in a group). This project investigates lifespan changes in behavioral and neuronal mechanisms that permit individuals to coordinate their behavior with each other in time and space. [more]

Head: Nils Bodammer
Research on human development seeks to delineate the age-graded changes in brain structure and function. This project seeks to optimize magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) and spectroscopy (MRS) to measure processes of brain maturation and senescence as well consequences of learning processes reproducibly. [more]

Head: Andreas M. Brandmaier
The Formal Methods project is dedicated to developing multivariate mathematical, statistical, and computational research tools that accommodate complex research designs with multimodal assessments collected over a wide range of timescales. It seeks to provide practical solutions to the methodological challenges of lifespan research and related fields of scientific inquiry. [more]