Maike Hille

External LIFE Fellow since 2020, MPI for Human Development, Berlin

I am a doctoral student at the Center for Lifespan Psychology and in the Lise Meitner Group for Environmental Neuroscience at the MPIB under the supervision of Simone Kühn and Ulman Lindenberger. My research interests focus on behavioral and neural plasticity, in particular learning-induced structural and functional brain changes across the human lifespan. I received my bachelor’s degree in Cognitive Science at Universität Osnabrück and my master’s degree in Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience at Freie Universität Berlin. In my master thesis, supervised by Yana Fandakova, I investigated the neural basis of motor sequence learning in children and adults. For my dissertation, I am working in a collaborative project that investigates motor skill acquisition in humans and mice. While humans train a fine-motor skill, I will track behavioral as well as volumetric and functional brain changes. To understand better the mechanisms that underlie motor skill learning, I will relate these training-induced brain changes in humans to cellular and volumetric brain changes in mice who are also trained in a fine-motor skill.

Dissertation project:

Training-induced brain changes during motor skill learning in humans and mice

Publications

Hille, M., Kühn, S., Kempermann, G., Bonhoeffer, T., & Lindenberger, U. (2024). From animal models to human individuality: Integrative approaches to the study of brain plasticity. Neuron, 112, 3522–3541. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.10.006