Faculty member

Research Interests

The overarching goal of the research group Milestones of Early Cognitive Development is to understand how typically human cognition develops in early childhood and how it is implemented in the maturing brain. As humans, we do not only think about what is the case, but we can also consider what might be the case, what will be the case in the future, or what people believe to be the case. To understand this, we need to hold several different representations of the world in mind and understand which of these refer to the actual world, which merely represent a possibility, someone's belief about the world, or refer to the past or the future. From reasoning about time, episodic memories, and considering different possibilities (for example, when we prepare for different possible outcomes in the future) to understanding how other people see the world, many of our daily cognitive processes rely on reasoning about different representations of the world and understanding that these representations need not correspond to the actual world. Being able to think about the world in terms of such internal representations may be one of the pillars of our uniquely human capacity for abstract thought. Our research aims to understand how reasoning about internal representations develops in early childhood and how internal representations are implemented in the human brain. In particular, we are interested in the role of the Default Network and its interaction with perceptual representations and the hippocampal system. We investigate these questions with a combination of neuroscientific and behavioral methods in early childhood and in adults including eye-tracking, EEG, MRI, and potentially MEG.

Available PhD Projects

Theory of Mind: Possible projects target our capacity to understand how our representations of other people's beliefs and perspective on the world are implemented in the brain, in parallel to our own representation of the world, and how this changes in early childhood as children begin to reason about other people's beliefs and unique perspective (referred to as Theory of Mind). For example, we are interested in the role of the Default Network and of language development for the development of Theory of Mind.

The self-concept and episodic memory: Other potential projects target the development of episodic memory in infancy and early childhood. In particular, we are interested in the maturation of functional brain networks including the Default network and hippocampal system and the role of the developing self-concept for the emergence of mature episodic memory.

Potential further projects could target other cognitive domains that may require reasoning about different internal representations or metarepresentation (e.g., temporal reasoning, metacognition, counterfactual reasoning etc.), as well as individualized and cross-cultural approaches to understand how individual differences and culture contribute to shaping the development of these capacities.