Projects
RaDS: Robust Acoustic Details Standard. KU Leuven
Institutionalized Resistance: Milo Rau's NTGent Period Ghent University
"Institutionalized Resistance: Milo Rau’s NTGent Period" will explore Swiss-German director Milo Rau’s work with Nederlands Toneel Gent (NTGent), one of Belgium’s most important cultural institutions, looking at both Rau’s work as a director with the theatre and as artistic director. The scope of the project will range from 2018, when Rau was named artistic director, to ca. 2024, engaging with three central lines of inquiry about this period: ...
Unruly rats and somewhat reasonable humans: Cognitive mechanisms of learning and generalization KU Leuven
The differences in mental abilities between human and non-human animals have aroused human curiosity from antiquity. At the end of the 19th century, researchers started to realize that knowledge about an animal’s learning history was of crucial importance for deriving conclusions about the mental capacities subserving its behavior. In tandem, the question was raised whether the mechanisms underlying learning would be different for humans than ...
Anti-Revolutionary Roads - The Distributive and Political Impact of Belgian Workmen’s Trains KU Leuven
The invention of the steam engine in the 18th century started a transport revolution that would gradually erode the costs of moving goods, people and ideas. Belgium was a global frontrunner in this revolution and was among the first to build railroads on such a large scale that, by the end of the 19th century, it had the densest track system in the world. Due to a unique government policy of cheap workmen’s tickets, it became one of the first ...
Socio-affective behavior evaluation employing continuous real-time monitoring of ultrasonic vocalizations in freely moving rats in a semi-natural environment KU Leuven
Rats are very social creatures living in large social colonies in the wild. Some of their social features include maternal caregiving, juvenile play fighting, and even empathy-driven helping behavior. They also display vocal communicative signals called ultrasonic vocalizations (USV) that have been attributed to different behavioral connotations according to their characteristic differences. The evaluation of USV in rats makes them a great ...
Interrogating Islamic Roads to Conviviality: Ethical and Religious Practices of Tolerance in Relation to Identity among Muslim Minorities in Belgium Ghent University
This project examines conviviality as an everyday practice of bridging religious and cultural difference from the perspective of Muslim minorities in Belgium living in the cities of Brussels, Antwerp and Liège. It examines the modalities in which Islamic frames of reference and ethical sensibilities are mobilized by individuals when striving for harmonious convivial living together across religious difference. First, the project compares ...
VIB Grant for Raes Lab_Period:2022-01-01-2026-12-31 Flanders Institute for Biotechnology
Toward improved translatability of animal research: Developing advanced social behavior tests in rats to assess microRNA depletion as a novel treatment target for the core social symptoms of Autism Spectrum Disorder. KU Leuven
Rodents emit distinct types of ultrasonic vocalizations. These ultrasonic vocalizations have been shown to serve important socio-affective communicative functions in regulating social interactions. For instance, 50-kHz calls help to maintain social contact and promote play behavior and are associated with activity in brain reward centers, as shown in playback experiments (The Journal of Neuroscience, 2014). Their production can be provoked by ...
Multiple roads towards rumination? Integrating cognitive control in self-regulatory and metacognitive models of rumination Ghent University
Cognitive control impairments pose a risk for depression via use of maladaptive emotion regulation strategies such as depressive rumination. However, recent studies suggest that a deficit model is inadequate in explaining the complex relation between cognitive control and depression vulnerability. In particular, there seem to be multiple etiological pathways towards rumination, each of which may hold a different role for cognitive control. To ...