Bachelorarbeitsthemen

Beschreibung: Multilingual individuals face a constant challenge in their day-to-day life - they must select the appropriate one of their two (or more) languages to communicate. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the mechanisms of polyglot language control intersect with those of domain general cognitive control. Recently, many authors have reported that using multiple languages can result in benefits in various aspects of general cognitive functioning, such as task switching, attentional control, and response selection. Even more eye-catching have been reports that multilingual populations show clinical symptoms of dementia 3-5 years later than their monolingual counterparts. But are these effects real, and reliable? An increasingly active debate has begun to take hold as the previously published effects fail to be replicated. In this project you will read about the controversies in this field and decide for yourself whether there is evidence for bilingual advantage in cognition. Literatur: Bak, T. H. (2016). The impact of bilingualism on cognitive ageing and dementia: Finding a path through a forest of confounding variables. Linguistic Approaches to Bilingualism, 6(1-2), 205-226. doi:10.1075/lab.15002.bak Bialystok, E. (2017). The bilingual adaptation: How minds accommodate experience. Psychol Bull, 143(3), 233-262. doi:10.1037/bul0000099 Diamond, J. (2010). The Benefits of Multilingualism. Science, 330(6002), 332-333. doi:10.1126/science.1195067 Paap, K. R., Johnson, H. A., & Sawi, O. (2015). Bilingual advantages in executive functioning either do not exist or are restricted to very specific and undetermined circumstances. Cortex, 69, 265-278. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.04.014 Paap, K. R., Johnson, H. A., & Sawi, O. (2016). Should the search for bilingual advantages in executive functioning continue? Cortex, 74, 305-314. doi:10.1016/j.cortex.2015.09.010
Anzahl Arbeiten für dieses Thema:
Zeitrahmen:
Eingabedatum: 06.01.2020
Kontakt: Alexis Hervais-Adelman, E-Mail

Beschreibung: Philosophers and linguists have long pondered whether language influences the way we perceive and represent the world. The so-called “Sapir-Whorf hypothesis” posits that the structure of a language determines a native speaker's perception and categorization of experience. This has proved controversial ever since its initial formulation in 1929. Psychologists, neuroscientists, comparative linguists and others have investigated this issue and the weight of evidence appears to support that, in some areas at least, there is indeed an impact of language on perception and cognition. Several domains have been examined, ranging from perception to memory and spatial navigation. In this project you will learn about the historical background of this debate and focus your literature research on one of the major lines of investigation into the role of language in perception (e.g. colour perception, object categorisation, motion event processing). You will evaluate the evidence in favour and against the influence of language on that domain.
Anzahl Arbeiten für dieses Thema:
Zeitrahmen:
Eingabedatum:
Kontakt: , E-Mail

Beschreibung: Although it may seem counter-intuitive, the resting brain is not devoid of activity. Indeed, evidence accumulated over the last decade suggests that the resting brain displays patterns of activity that are repetitive and can be characterised in terms of their spatial and temporal properties. It has further become apparent that these properties can be predictive of both behavioural performance on a wide range of cognitive tasks and of brain activation patterns when executing tasks. Furthermore, resting-state brain properties have also been found to be sufficiently different between individuals that they may provide a "fingerprint" that can be used identify individuals. The existing data suggest that the brain's resting-state reveals aspects of the brain's underlying organisation that contribute to individual differences in behaviour. In this project, the recent literature will be examined and integrated, in order to gain a deeper understanding of how resting state brains can be informative for behaviour.
Anzahl Arbeiten für dieses Thema:
Zeitrahmen:
Eingabedatum:
Kontakt: , E-Mail

Beschreibung: It has long been known that the brain shows patterns of oscillatory activity, and it has recently been demonstrated that neuronal oscillations are instrumental in cognitive processes. These oscillations exist in multiple, functionally distinct, frequency ranges. This is especially intriguing in the domain of speech comprehension, as the speech signal similarly contains information at different timescales, such as the phone, the syllable, the word and the phrase. Recent evidence suggests that brain oscillations may help segment and extract meaningful units from heard speech, which is usually delivered as a continuous stream. However, this interpretation is not unproblematic and it remains uncertain whether oscillations genuinely have a causal role in speech comprehension or are merely an epiphenomenon resulting from perceiving a rhythmic signal. This project invites you to read some of the key literature in this field and to critically evaluate the evidence.
Anzahl Arbeiten für dieses Thema:
Zeitrahmen:
Eingabedatum:
Kontakt: , E-Mail

Beschreibung: Multilingual individuals face a constant challenge in their day-to-day life – they must select the appropriate one of their two (or more) languages to communicate. There is considerable evidence to suggest that the mechanisms of polyglot language control intersect with those of domain general cognitive control. Recently, many authors have reported that using multiple languages can result in benefits in various aspects of general cognitive functioning, such as task switching, attentional control, and response selection. Even more eye-catching have been reports that multilingual populations show clinical symptoms of dementia 3-5 years later than their monolingual counterparts. But are these effects real, and reliable? An increasingly active debate has begun to take hold as the previously published effects fail to be replicated. In this project you will read about the controversies in this field and decide for yourself whether there is evidence for bilingual advantage in cognition.
Anzahl Arbeiten für dieses Thema:
Zeitrahmen:
Eingabedatum:
Kontakt: , E-Mail