Press Releases

Imagine chatting at a party and trying to listen to your friend telling you about her day while there are other people talking, laughing and celebrating at the same time – difficult, isn’t it? The challenge of listening to one speaker when several people speak at once is called the cocktail party problem. Researchers from the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and Leipzig University in collaboration with colleagues from the Max-Planck-Institute for Empirical Aesthetics and Lübeck University investigated what happens in the brain when we try to focus on one talker while ignoring another one. In the new study, now published in the Journal of Neuroscience, they show that the processing of both the voice we attend to and the voice we ignore plays a key role in how well we understand speech. more

As adults, we remember information better if it relates to ourselves. Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann's team from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and the Technical University of Nuremberg, together with colleagues from the University of Copenhagen, investigated how this self-reference effect develops in infancy and how babies memorise information before their self-concept develops. The results were published in the journal Nature Communications. more

Human interaction crucially relies on our ability to infer other people’s thoughts and intentions, a process widely known as Theory of Mind or mentalizing. Even little children are sensitive to other person's mental states. Scientists from the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Research Centre Jülich now show in an actual study in Nature Communications that the cerebellum as a small part of the brain plays a crucial role in establishing the cognitive processes underlying Theory of Mind in early childhood and thus the undisrupted development of social skills.  more

Offering doctoral students a first-class education and attracting the most brilliant minds from across the world — these are goals of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) in Leipzig. In close cooperation with Leipzig University, the Institute is launching the International Max Planck Research School on Cognitive NeuroImaging (IMPRS CoNI) next year. The programme will give particularly talented students the opportunity to complete their doctorate in the field of "cognitive neuroscience" with a focus on imaging methods such as magnetic resonance imaging. What is special about this is that each doctoral student will follow an individually adapted training plan, through which each can further his or her education according to individual their professional needs. more