Ageing-Attitudes during childhood (2024 - now)
Project Lead: Dr. Rodriguez Buritica (together with the Department of Developmental Psychology, Prof. M. Riediger, Friedrich Schiller Universität Jena)
Beliefs about ageing-attitudes are formed during development. The aim of this project is to
understand children’s attitudes (within mid-childhood) with respect to ageing and how these
influence their learning from different age-groups by combining behavioral and computational
measures.
Age-related differences in the representation of state spaces (2024-2027)
Project Lead: Prof. Ben Eppinger
PhD Student: Ezgi Uzun
The research project aims at testing the core behavioral and cognitive neuroscientific predictions of the diminished state space theory. Additionally, another primary objective is to examine if the diminished state space theory of human aging is applicable to various cognitive domains.
Observational learning in developing humans and artificial agents (2024-2025)
Project Lead: Dr. Rodriguez Buritica (as external PI within the Cluster Science of Intelligence together with Prof. V. Hafner and Prof. M. Brass, Technische Universität Berlin)
Observational learning is particularly relevant for the offspring of intelligent species and of interest
across different disciplines, including psychology, cognitive neuroscience, and robotics. In this project
we will investigate how children and adults integrate motoric actions and outcomes of others. We
will track how observed information is integrated across development (mid-childhood vs. young
adulthood) and how these dynamics can be captured by computational models and within artificial
agents.
Developmental differences in the role of episodic memory for observational learning (2023-2025)
Project Lead: Dr. Rodriguez Buritica (together with Social Intelligence Lab of Prof. M. Brass, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin)
PhD Student: Maria Woitow
Children heavily rely on observational learning for acquiring new behavior and knowledge, but it is
still unclear whether experiential learning elicits better memory encoding than observational
learning and whether this might differ across human development. The current project aims to
investigate the effect of experiential and observational learning on memory across human
development (mid-childhood vs. young adulthood) by combining behavioral and computational
measures.
Lifespan & Decision-Making Lab (2013- now)
Project Lead: Prof. Ben Eppinger
The aim of LDMLab is to investigate whether children and older adults differ from younger adults in how they update their beliefs in uncertain and changing environments. The aim is to develop mechanistic, neurobiologically plausible theories of lifelong age differences in adaptive learning. The project involves collaborations with Rasmus Bruckner (FU Berlin) and Dr. Matthew Nassar (Brown University) and is supported by the Canada Research Chair (CRC).