We are ded­i­cat­ed to re­search­ing the cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties of in­di­vid­u­als. More specif­i­cal­ly, we want to un­der­stand what mo­ti­vates in­di­vid­u­als to learn new things, what caus­es the brain to lose neu­rons in abun­dance so dis­or­ders such as de­men­tia and strokes can emerge, and why in­di­vid­u­als be­have the way they do (such as buy­ing spe­cif­ic prod­ucts, main­tain­ing pat­terns of be­hav­ior in every­day sit­u­a­tions, etc.). And in the age of these chal­lenges, we are ex­plor­ing the in­sid­i­ous in­tri­ca­cies of how the SARS-CoV­‑2 virus gets in­to our brains, how it af­fects our men­tal and cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties, and what long-term ef­fects may ex­ist by means of this virus.

A ma­jor fo­cus of our re­search is on the neur­al bases of high­er brain func­tions such as lan­guage, emo­tion and so­cial be­hav­ior, mu­sic, and ac­tion. We are par­tic­u­lar­ly in­ter­est­ed in how these are per­ceived, processed, planned and pro­duced, but al­so how per­cep­tion and pro­duc­tion in­flu­ence each oth­er. Fur­ther­more, we are in­ves­ti­gat­ing the brain’s ca­pac­i­ty for plas­tic change and its in­flu­ence on var­i­ous cog­ni­tive abil­i­ties as well as the neu­ronal and hor­mon­al ba­sis of civ­i­liza­tion dis­eases such as hy­per­ten­sion and obe­si­ty. In ad­di­tion, the fur­ther de­vel­op­ment of imag­ing tech­niques for neu­ro­science and cog­ni­tive sci­ence is a cen­tral fo­cus of our research.

This in­cludes in particular:

• Ex­per­i­men­tal ma­nip­u­la­tion of the phys­i­cal self and its in­flu­ence on the change of emo­tion­al, cog­ni­tive, mo­ti­va­tion­al and so­cial processes
• The role and im­por­tance of speech pro­duc­tion mech­a­nisms in the per­cep­tion of language
• Cog­ni­tive and neur­al mech­a­nisms of speech per­cep­tion, speech and voice production
• Changes in psy­choso­cial be­ing in old age and their gen­er­al pro­gres­sion from neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive diseases
• The most im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion on main­tain­ing the learn­ing mech­a­nism through­out life, cleans­ing the brain dur­ing sleep and chang­ing per­cep­tion through new media
• Emo­tion pro­cess­ing of spo­ken lan­guage, acoustic cues, in face pro­cess­ing and es­pe­cial­ly in le­sions of the cog­ni­tive struc­tures e.g. due to strokes.