Sina Alexandra Schwarze

External LIFE Fellow since 2021, MPI for Human Development

I am a pre-doctoral fellow at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the MPI for Human Development in Berlin under the supervision of Yana Fandakova and Ulman Lindenberger. My research focuses on mechanisms of behavioral and neural plasticity, especially concerning the development of cognitive control during childhood. More specifically, I am interested in how the networks underlying cognitive control differ in their functional and structural organization between children and adults, and how they are influenced by different training interventions.

For the thesis project of my Bachelor’s degree in Psychology at the University of Mannheim (2018), I examined behavioral inhibition and how this cognitive control mechanism is influenced by the kind of stimuli used. In December 2020, I completed my Master’s degree in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at the Freie Universität Berlin. For my master project, I investigated the differences in directed connectivity in the cognitive control network during task switching between children and adults at the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the MPI for Human Development under the supervision of Yana Fandakova.

Dissertation project:

Mechanisms of cognitive control plasticity during childhood

Publications

Schwarze, S. A., Laube, C. Khosravani, N., Lindenberger, U., Bunge, S. A., & Fandakova, Y. (2023). Does prefrontal connectivity during task switching help or hinder children’s performance? Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience, 60, Article 101217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dcn.2023.101217

Schwarze, S. A., Poppa, C., Gawronska, S. M., & Fandakova, Y. (2021). The more, the merrier? What happens in your brain when you are multitasking? Frontiers for Young Minds, 9, Article 584481. https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2021.584481