Development and plasticity of control and control beliefs
Professor Nikolaus Steinbeis, UCL
4th March 2025, 4-5pm.
In-person in Cambridge, and online.
Talk introduction
My research focusses on understanding processes that regulate our thoughts and actions and their mechanistic role in driving healthy psychological development. I will present recent and ongoing experimental work on two such processes, namely cognitive control and control beliefs.
In the first part I will present data from a recently completed randomized control trial aiming to improve cognitive control in 235 children aged 6-11, showing no effects across a host of behavioural and neural outcomes. In the second half I will present more recent work on the relationship between control beliefs and stress. I will show data on (i) the buffering effects of heightened sense of control against later stress and (ii) that control beliefs shape adaptive responding to stress.
I will discuss these findings in line with recent frameworks characterising control as a highly rational and dynamic process and outline implications for interventions.
Speaker biography
I did my thesis at the Max-Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences on the neuroscience of music and was awarded my PhD in 2008. I then moved to the University of Zurich for a postdoc in developmental social neuroscience at the Institute for Empirical Economics. I then returned to the Max-Planck Institute as Senior Researcher and Group Leader.
After fellowships at the Weill Cornell Medical School and the Douglas Mental Health University Institute I joined the Department of Developmental Psychology at the University of Leiden as an Assistant Professor in 2015. In 2017 I moved to UCL's Division of Psychology and Language Sciences as an Associate Professor and became Full Professor of Developmental Neuroscience there in 2021.
I have received various accolades and fellowships (i.e. Jacobs Research Fellowship, Humboldt Fellowship, German-Israeli Foundation Fellowship) and my work has been funded by the Jacobs Foundation, the German Research Foundation, the European Research Council, and the Economic and Social Research Council.
To book
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