Neda Khosravani

LIFE Fellow since 2016, MPI for Human Development, Berlin

I received my master's degree and bachelor's degree in Clinical Psychology, both from Shiraz University in Iran. During more than four years of experience in teaching psychology, I tried to focus on more empirical aspects, predominantly cognitive performance and neuroscience. Moreover, in six years of clinical practice on patients, I tried to get closer to more practical and efficient aspects of interventions. During this period, I realized that people have expansive capacity for change. They can adapt to altering environmental demands; obviously, this adaptation emerges in their behavior. Subsequently, I became curious about changes in the brain; in terms of both function and structure.
Having joined the Mechanisms and Sequential Progression of Plasticity project at the Center for Lifespan Psychology, I am investigating the relative merits of two alternative intervention strategies (“bottom-up” and “top-down”) for boosting fluid intelligence in children under the supervision of Ulman Lindenberger and Yana Fandakova. My dissertation will address an important and unresolved question: Is fluid intelligence more easily improved by practicing relational reasoning tasks or by practicing working memory tasks?

Dissertation project:

The effects of task-switching training in childhood: Individual differences in performance change

Selected 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

Broeker, L., Brüning, J., Fandakova, Y., Khosravani, N., Kiesel, A., Kubik, V., Kübler, S., Manzey, D., Monno, I., Raab, M., & Schubert, T. (2022). Individual differences fill the uncharted intersections between cognitive structure, flexibility, and plasticity in multitasking. Psychological Review, 129(6), 1486–1494. https://doi.org/10.1037/rev0000376

Khosravani, N., & Goodarzi, M. A. (2013). Patients with schizophrenia show deficits on spatial frequency doubling. Vision Research, 93, 49–53. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.visres.2013.10.007