Open Lecture Series

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Arguably, human ontogentic development is more than a simple story of growth during childhood and decline with advancing age. Rather, the intricate interplay between genetic dispositions, environmental opportunities, biological mechanisms, and personal experiences shapes a unique intellectual and emotional repertoire across the lifespan. Since its foundations ~ 50 years ago (e.g., Baltes et al., 1977), lifespan developmental science has aimed at deriving general principles describing ontogenetic change in intellectual, emotional, and social functions integrating and transforming insights from child-development and aging research (e.g., Baltes et al., 1999; Craik & Bialystok, 2006). This view was further pushed by fusing advances in modelling of behavioral change with modern genetic and neuroscientific methods broadening the scope of developmental thinking from the behavioral sciences to nearby biological, medical, and artificial intelligence fields. 

The present lecture series has been conceived as a virtual, open-science exchange on conceptual and methodological advances in the study of behavioral development across the lifespan. It is meant to provide leading researchers with a platform to speak about their views on the ways in which the interplay between theory and methods has informed scientific progress in the study of human behavioral development.