Topics for Bachelor's Theses

Beschreibung: Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) is a neurodevelopmental disorder characterized by inattention, hyperactivity, and impulsivity. Cognitive paradigms, such as go/no-go tasks, flanker tasks, and continuous performance tasks, are widely used to assess attentional control, response inhibition, and executive functioning in individuals with ADHD. This thesis aims to explore the effectiveness of different cognitive paradigms in measuring ADHD-related cognitive deficits in children, adolescents, adults. A focus will be on finding appropriate dependent variables to capture differences in the ADHD population during cognitive paradigms. The student will review literature on ADHD assessment methods, examine experimental findings and the effects of symptom severity on behavioural and neurophysiological studies, and discuss the implications of cognitive paradigms for ADHD diagnosis and treatment.
Kontakt: Larissa Behnke, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Cognitive processes in health and disease are tightly tied to neural oscillations (i.e., rhythmic fluctuations of synchronized post-synaptic activity). It has previously been suggested that rhythmic sensory stimulation can be used to strengthen and temporally align said neural oscillations (known as sensory entrainment) and that this mechanism can be used for causal inferences in experimental research and as potential treatment tool for oscillopathies in real life. But which factors determine its efficacy and which advancements have been or might be made to boost such?

The aim of this Bachelor thesis is to summarize the current evidence for sensory entrainment in human health and disease, to identify potential driving factors and to provide recommendations for future entrainment-related research and applications.
Kontakt: Charline Peylo, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Cognitive processes like perception, attention and memory are closely linked to brain activity and neural oscillations (i.e., rhythmic fluctuations of synchronized post-synaptic activity) more specifically. The brain, however, co-exists with multiple other organs that provide important information about the organism and might thus not operate in isolation to shape cognition. In line with this reasoning, recent studies suggest a close interaction between oscillations in the brain and oscillations in the body (e.g., circadian or gastrointestinal rhythms).
Kontakt: Charline Peylo, E-Mail

Beschreibung: We live in a high-dimensional world and in order to create a holistic percept of such, we have to integrate sensations across the different modalities. Some people (so-called synesthetes) have such strong cross-modal associations that uni-sensory stimuli can induce multi-sensory percepts (e.g., experiencing a certain taste while listening to a specific song). How are these two phenomena related to one another? Can synesthesia be considered a special form of multi-sensory integration or do different mechanisms govern these two processes? And how might research in one of these two fields inform the other?

The aim of this Bachelor thesis will be to summarize, compare and discuss current models of multi-sensory integration and synesthesia and to provide recommendations for future research in both of these domains.
Kontakt: Charline Peylo, E-Mail

Beschreibung: mergence of alpha oscillations (8-12 Hz) is typically observed in the electroencephalogram (EEG) during eye-closed resting states. It is thus widely accepted that alpha oscillations are indicative of cortical idleness. However, alpha waves may play a relatively active role under certain circumstances, e.g., they help protect the content of working memory from the interference of irrelevant information. In this thesis, you will have the opportunity to gain a comprehensive understanding of the emergence, characteristics, and functional significance of alpha waves during working memory.
Kontakt: Yifan Zeng, E-Mail