About Brain and CognitionScientists at Leiden University conduct research on all aspects of the human brain. Psychologists, medical experts and linguists study such diverse subjects as the adolescent brain, how we learn to read, Alzheimer's and stress. You can read all about their work in this dossier.
Current newsCuriosity makes people stressed. Satisfying the curiosity works as a reward and also stimulates the memory. Researchers at the Leiden Institute for Brain and Cognition have provided new evidence for a classical theory about human curiosity using functional MRI scans. The researchers have published an article on the subject in 'Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience'.
The training for surgeons could be more realistic and more efficient if 'evidence-based' methods were used, according to surgeon and instructor Jaap Hamming. He is therefore working closely with cognitive psychologists Guido Band and Bernhard Hommel on improvements to the training. A custom-made training programme would take more account of the individual surgeons being trained.
Is attention from women different from attention from men? Leiden researchers and their colleagues in Toronto investigated the effects of the hormone oestrogen on spontaneous attention. They were hoping in this way to explain differences between the sexes. Women turned out to only be different from men when they had a high level of oestrogen in their menstruation cycle.