Projects
Europe, Brain and music: New perspectives for stimulating cognitive and sensory processes (EBRASMUS) Ghent University
The aim of the EBRAMUS project is to increase our overall understanding of brain function and to have an impact on clinical and educational applications by developing new diagnostic tools, training and rehabilitation techniques, and new music technology. The EBRAMUS team is composed of an international and interdisciplinary group of partners. The program relies on 11 projects. IPEM is the partner that takes the lead for the cochlear Implant ...
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 ...
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 ...
What makes us cognitively flexible? A new learning perspective Ghent University
Much of human behavior is characterized by the extraordinary ability to quickly reconfigure our mind, and switch between different tasks, often referred to as cognitive flexibility. While most psychologists agree on the kind of behaviors that fall under the term cognitive flexibility, we have only a poor understanding on what drives cognitive flexibility. When defining cognitive flexibility, its putative underlying processes are often ...
ModularExperience : How the modularization of the mind unfolds in the brain. KU Leuven
PSYNAT The Psychological Benefits of Interacting with Nature. KU Leuven
There is increasing scientific evidence that interacting with nature improves cognition and boosts feelings of emotional well-being. However, as more of the world is being developed, people's exposure to nature is being threatened. With that comes potentially harmful effects on human cognition and mental health. The Attention Restoration Theory suggests that nature is beneficial because it captures bottom-up attention moderately - enough to ...
How anxiety transforms human cognition: an Affective Neuroscience perspective Ghent University
Anxiety, a state of apprehension or fear, may provoke cognitive or behavioural disorders and eventually lead to serious medical illnesses. The high prevalence of anxiety disorders in our society sharply contrasts with the lack of clear factual knowledge about the corresponding brain mechanisms at the origin of this profound change in the appraisal of the environment. Little is known about how the psychopathological state of anxiety ultimately ...
Space LOAD Spatial processing under attentional load: from clinical to fMRI evidence Ghent University
Everyday life requires to continuously process the surrounding space to extract behaviourally-relevant information. When attention is loaded, however, this processing might become difficult. This happens, for instance, when space has to be attended while additional stimuli have to be processed in parallel (e.g., talking while driving). In the present project the attentional system will be loaded through visual or auditory dual-tasking to ...
Updating the Mind: the mechanisms behind behavioural change Ghent University
Translation of basic research on human executive control into facilitating behavioural change is a holy grail for
psychologists and neuroscientists. Adaptive behaviour is attributed to executive functions that update the cognitive
system. But how system updating mechanisms regulate behavioural change is still unclear. This stems from a lack of
careful process analysis and a failure to integrate findings from ...