Children and adolescents really do use their ‘smart’ brain areas. This has been confirmed by an extensive and long-running study of the brain carried out by developmental psychologist Sabine Peters . Her findings can have important consequences for education. PhD defence 27 January.

Serge Rombouts is a physicist whose PhD thesis was about functional MRI (fMRI). This visualises activity in regions of the brain. The appealing images of glowing brain regions that emerge from the computer are the result of calculations. According to Rombouts, this isn’t proper artificial intelligence.…

As of the 1st of January 2021, Lisa Cheng, Professor of General Linguistics, will be the next Scientific Director of the Leiden University Centre for Linguistics (LUCL). She tells us about LUCL and shares some of her thoughts about her upcoming role.

A liveable planet. More biodiversity. And resources which are being managed wisely. At the CML, we want to make an impact with our research and education. On this website you can read what we do to achieve that.

On 1 April 2020, Marc Broekema defended his thesis 'Cognitive Bias in the Judgment of Business Valuations and Valuators'. The doctoral research was supervised by Prof. J.I. van der Rest.

Using brain imaging to discover the area in the brain that recognizes emotion.

How do cognitive, motivational, and affective processes interact to select actions?

A novel mathematical model describes spatial-temporal drug distribution within one or more brain units, which are cubic representations of a piece of brain tissue with brain capillaries at the edges.

From 5 to 7 June, the conference "The Senses, Cognition, and the Body in Medieval Devotional Practices" will take place at the University of Padova. The conference programme can be found below. The conference can be attended virtually through the registration link below.

Novel language learning activates different neural processes than was previously thought. A Leiden research team has discovered parallel but separate contributions from the hippocampus and Broca's area, the learning centre in the left hemisphere. The right hemisphere of the brain also seems to play…

On May 17th, Arthur Crucq succesfully defended his doctoral thesis and graduated. The Leiden University Centre for Linguistics congratulates Arthur on this great result.

The recently published book 'Tense-Switching in Classical Greek A Cognitive Approach' by Arjan Nijk provides classicists and linguists in general with a complete account of the 'historical present' in Classical Greek.

The Developmental Psychology specialisation of the Research Master’s in Psychology offers a strong theoretical background to provide the varied knowledge-base needed for a thorough understanding of emotional and cognitive development across childhood and adolescence.

The Cognitive Psychology Unit is organized as follows:

Knowledge and culture subproject 4:

The focus of the Bachelor Data Science & Artificial Intelligence is on computer science, and its applications in Artificial Intelligence. You will receive a strong basis in mathematics, statistics and computer science, combined with advanced knowledge of machine learning, cognitive science, human-robot…

Sanne Kellij and colleagues systematically reviewed 142 articles, examining evidence for three hypotheses on the relation between victimization and social information processing.

How does our brain interpret traces of evidence? Can someone who is suffering from brain damage be held accountable for criminal offences? And should it be possible to adjust a criminal’s behaviour with deep brain stimulation? These questions were addressed during the Public Scientific Day Brein & Recht…

Social and Behavioural Sciences, Psychology

The research question is that unconscious perseverative cognition (UPC) is responsible for a considerable part of cardiovascular (CV) activity that occurs even in the absence of threats and other stressors that one may encounter in one’s daily life.

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On June 10, Michelle Achterberg received the prize for best dissertation from the Dutch Neurofederation, the network of Dutch neuroscientists, for her thesis 'Like me, ore else...'. Achterberg obtained her doctorate cum laude from the Gravitation Program 'Samen Uniek' of the Leiden Consortium on Individual…

The ‘right’ amount of dopamine in the brain makes study participants better at solving certain cognitive tasks. This is the conclusion of Bryant Jongkees after experiments and a literature review. PhD defence on 21 February.

Children’s brains react in the same way to social feedback as adults’ brains. But handling frustration or aggression after being rejected is a different matter, developmental psychologist Michelle Achterberg has discovered. Using fMRI techniques, the development of the child brain has now been studied…

This dissertation investigates Extended Lexical Units (ELUs), elements that are bigger than just one word and which are stored in the Lexicon.

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The brains of adolescents react more responsively to receiving rewards. This can lead to risky behaviour, but, according to Leiden University research, it also has a positive function: it makes learning easier. Publication in Nature Communications.

Here, you can browse the publications of the Navigation Lab Leiden:

There seem to be genes that influence how our brains develop over time. A large international consortium has discovered this with an extensive study. The results of the study were recently published in Nature Neuroscience.

It was already known that social anxiety disorder often affects more than one person in the same family. But research by PhD student Janna Marie Bas-Hoogendam has now shown that there are genetic brain characteristics that are associated with social anxiety. The PhD ceremony will take place on 14 Ja…

In this research line, the role pharmacological agents and neurochemcial processes play in behavior and cognition is examined with a particular focus on pain, placebo and nocebo effects and intensive care treatments.

Brain researcher Elseline Hoekzema has discovered that the structure of the brain changes during pregnancy, particularly those areas related to social functions. These changes persist for at least two years after the mother gives birth. Publication in Nature Neuroscience on 19 December.

Two events on Music and the Brain will be held in Leiden later this month.

Bernard Bernards examines constraints on innovation by focusing on cognitive uncertainty as a personal state that may affect innovative work behavior.

To study relationships between emotion regulation after negative and traumatic life events and psychopathology. Within this context, another goal is to develop and validate emotion regulation questionnaires.

How do practice and theory reinforce one another in neuroscience? Professor Birte Forstmann’s inaugural lecture on 2 October will be about building interdisciplinary bridges between cognitive neuroscience and cognitive models. Her approach may lead to brain research with fewer side-effects for patie…

At science festival 'Over de kop', surprising brain facts alternate with confronting stories from the operating room. Researchers explain why our brains love beans and why you should never ride a racing bike without a helmet.

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is the most frequent neurodegenerative disorder and the primary cause of dementia. The neuropathological features of AD include the occurrence of senile plaques, neurofibrillary tangles, decreased synaptic density, and loss of neurons. An obstacle in the study and treatment…

During adolescence, mood disorder onset peaks. Mood variability is associated with negative mental health outcomes, so understanding biological factors that might be associated with mood variability, such as sleep and structural brain development, could elucidate the mechanisms underlying mood and anxiety…

Synchrony in heart rate, skin conductance and pupil diameter plays a big role in human social interactions, such as gaining trust or being attracted toward each other. This is what Eliska Prochazkova found in several lab and field experiments. PhD defence on 4 March 2021.

The bachelor's programme in Psychology in Leiden covers the full breadth of psychology. Our bachelor's students have the opportunity to specialise. Our master's students prepare themselves for a career as a ‘scientist - practitioner'. In the one year master's programme the emphasis is on practise; in…

Leiden University research institutes based in Leiden and The Hague.

To argue that people can control the relative contributions of goal-driven and stimulus-driven processes to decision-making and action selection.

Exclusion elicits the same response in children as in adolescents and adults. That is what psychologist Mara van der Meulen found when she studied brain activity in primary schoolchildren. ‘What is new for us is that it is the same in childhood as later in life.’ Doctoral defence on 10 December.

Our ability to learn and control movements is essential for engaging in goal-directed behaviour. From buttoning your shirt and driving a car, to cooking dinner and brushing your teeth -- our actions in daily life rely on this ability.