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Our primary methods are experimental behavioral studies and brain imaging. The majority of our studies involve functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), but we also employ other brain measures as needed to address scientific questions. Our lab is equipped with a 128 channel EEG station, an autonomic recordings station and shared use of 1.5T and 3T functional MRI scanners, located at the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC). We participate in the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition (LIBC), which is an interfaculty center for interdisciplinary research on brain and cognition, supported by the Leiden University Medical Center (LUMC) and the Faculties of Social & Behavioral Sciences, Arts, and Mathematics & Natural Sciences, Leiden University (LIBC). Click on the topics on the right to get a short overview of our studies. Cognitive ControlWhen learning new information (such as in school), it is of great importance to keep information in an active state, flexibly switch between different tasks, inhibit irrelevant information, and monitor the outcomes of our actions. Despite these important requirements, it is not yet known how the maturation of these functions is related to changes in brain function over the course of child development. The prefrontal cortex is a key brain region for different cognitive control functions, but its sub-regions contribute to cognitive control in different ways, and we do not yet understand their developmental time courses. Thus, the challenge is to understand the functional maturation of these different prefrontal cortex regions, how they work together, and whether they have separate developmental trajectories. In our current projects we use behavioral, EEG, fMRI and DTI recordings to examine how prefrontal cortex development results in changes in separable cognitive control functions. Further, we train cognitive control functions in children to test whether under-recruitment of the prefrontal cortex is the result of maturational constraints (i.e., this region is not yet accessible) or limited practice (i.e., children do not know how to use this region). Risk-taking and decision-makingChildren and adolescents are more prone to take risks, despite knowing which choices are more advantageous in the long run. Prior neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies have suggested that the ability to anticipate, produce and evaluate risky decisions depends on the communication between limbic and prefrontal cortex regions. Therefore, we hypothesize that interactions between prefrontal cortex and emotion-related brain regions are important for the development of warning signals associated with disadvantageous decisions. We are currently studying the neural correlates of developmental change in risk-taking using behavioural, autonomic and fMRI recordings, and we relate this development to social maturity levels in adolescence. We are also studying whether risky decisions are different when these are made for another person, thereby distinguishing between self/other perspectives. Social decisions
Our studies take a brain-behavior approach to explain transitions in childhood, adolescence and adulthood in social decision-making. In our current studies, emotion-inducing processes, such as fairness or rejection, and emotion-regulating processes, such as accumulating long-term benefits, are disentangled using behavioral, autonomic, and fMRI recording in participants aged 8-25. We are testing whether social decision-making in childhood and adolescence is characterized by a hyperactive emotion-inducing system in combination with a slowly developing emotion-regulation system. |
Research in the lab examines the development of cognitive, emotional and social decision-making using cognitive neuroscience methods.
In childhood and adolescence, there are major transitions in social decision-making, but the systems that drive these changes are still unknown. Recent advances in social cognitive neuroscience research have shows that separable neural networks are involved during the evaluation of complex social decisions, such as evaluating fairness, trust and reciprocity.