Projects
Transparency instruments to quantify the method transparency, analytic robustness, and replicability of empirical research. KU Leuven
A basic requirement in science is that published findings are sufficiently trustworthy. The current state-of-the-art strategy to assess the trustworthiness of findings involves meta-analyzing all known findings on a topic. Such strategy, however, is seriously flawed because it does not account for various forms of researcher biases that contaminate each study included in a meta-analysis. Consequently, it is currently not possible for ...
Outside-in: How Bullying in Adolescence Gets Into The Mind and Under the Skin Ghent University
Being bullied is a major stressor for many adolescents and it is recognized as a public health concern worldwide. Adolescents who are exposed to bullying are at increased risk for mental and physical health problems, which could even perpetuate into adulthood. Unfortunately, current understandings of how bullying can pose such deleterious effects remain poor, thus limiting our ability to inform prevention and intervention efforts. This ...
Fear reduction strategies relevant for exposure therapy: Devaluation and extinction learning in anxiety disorder patients and their neurobiological basis KU Leuven
My ambition is to become an independent PI and clinical psychologist with a novel research line focusing on treatment optimization and personalization for anxiety disorders and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The MSCA-IF will provide the essential building blocks for this research line, and provides the opportunity to develop generic skills necessary to transfer from a postdoc position to an Assistant Professor position. Training ...
Visual perception in deep neural networks KU Leuven
Solving the unsolved Rare Diseases (Solve-Rd). University of Antwerp
Imaging of Neuroinflammation in Neurodegenerative Diseases (INMIND). University of Antwerp
The Predictive Visual Brain in Autism Spectrum Disorders. KU Leuven
"New theories of Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) based on Predictive Coding have been proposed in recent years. These theories are motivated by the increasing empirical support for predictive coding models of the brain and the unprecedented amount of autism symptoms that can be explained by this framework. Recently, Van de Cruys et al. (2014) proposed the ""High Inflexible Precision of Prediction Errors in ASD"" theory, suggesting that ...
Animal Cognition in Urban Environments: The effect of diet and the gut microbiome Ghent University
Natural habitats are disappearing at record speeds, and our world is becoming increasingly urbanised. Recently, researchers started exploring how cognitive abilities (the mechanisms by which animals acquire, process, store and act on information from the environment) may allow animals to adapt to urban environments. Many of these studies revealed cognitive differences between
urban and non-urban dwelling animals and linked these to ...
How to deal with how you feel: Understanding and training context-dependent emotion regulation KU Leuven
Emotion regulation refers to the variety of processes through which people attempt to influence their emotions. The ability to effectively regulate emotions is key to psychological wellbeing, and emotion dysregulation is a central element of mood disorders. The existing research tends to paint emotion regulation strategies as either adaptive or maladaptive, but increasingly researchers are beginning to realize that this characterization is an ...