Press releases

At the annual meeting of the MPG on 25 June 2025, the Otto Hahn Medal was awarded 28 times for outstanding scientific achievements in connection with doctoral theses. This year, Katharina Menn from the Department of Neuropsychology and Malte Brammerloh from the Department of Neurophysics at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences (MPI CBS) received two of the coveted awards. Here they answer three questions about their research in a short interview.
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Artificial intelligence (AI) is becoming increasingly important and is already present in many aspects of our daily lives—but does AI perceive and think about the world the same way we humans do? To answer this question, Max Planck researchers and members of the Justus-Liebig-Universität Gießen Florian Mahner, Lukas Muttenthaler and Martin Hebart  investigated whether AI recognizes objects similarly to humans and published their findings in the journal Nature Machine Intelligence. They developed a new approach that allows to clearly identify and compare the key dimensions that humans and AI pay attention to when seeing objects.
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Human interaction crucially relies on our ability to infer other people’s thoughts and intentions, a process widely known as Theory of Mind or mentalizing. Even little children are sensitive to other person's mental states. Scientists from the Max-Planck-Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig and the Research Centre Jülich now show in an actual study in Nature Communications that the cerebellum as a small part of the brain plays a crucial role in establishing the cognitive processes underlying Theory of Mind in early childhood and thus the undisrupted development of social skills. 
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The brain is a complex network of neurons that communicate with each other in circuits embedded in the structural scaffolding of the brain. There are two main types of neurons: excitatory neurons, which transmit information by amplifying neural signals, and inhibitory neurons, which can suppress the signals. Together, excitation and inhibition maintain a carefully tuned balance, known as the excitation-inhibition (E-I) balance, which is essential for healthy brain function. But the level of this balance is suggested to differ between individuals, become impaired in disorders, and mature throughout development. In their new paper in the journal Science Advances, Amin Saberi and Sofie Valk from MPI CBS together with Simon Eickhoff from Research Centre Jülich focused on this balance within neuronal circuits, and used computer simulations of individualized brain models to study its change with age during adolescence.
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Excellent success for Leipzig University: its Leipzig Center of Metabolism (LeiCeM) research cluster will receive multi-million-euro funding over the coming years as part of the Excellence Strategy of the German federal and state governments. This was announced by the Joint Commission of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and the German Council of Science and Humanities (WR).
MPI CBS is involved in the cluster alongside four other Max Planck Institutes. more

We know this from sport or rehabilitation: if you imagine a movement and practise it with the corresponding kinaesthetic feeling in your head, you can often improve your performance. Magdalena Gippert, Arno Villringer, Bernhard Sehm and Vadim Nikulin from MPI CBS in Leipzig have now investigated whether imagining just a part of a motor sequence is sufficient to support the learning of the entire movement. They used an exoskeleton robot to measure the motor learning of the study participants. The results of the study now published in PNAS could, among other things, help to improve the recovery of motor skills after a stroke through targeted imagination training.
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Language processing in humans depends on the neuronal connection between language areas in the brain. Until recently, this language network was thought to be uniquely human. Now, in a discovery about the evolutionary basis of our language, researchers of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, in collaboration with the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology and the Alfred Wegener Institute, have identified a comparable neuronal connection in the brains of chimpanzees. Their findings have been published in the journal Nature Communications.
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How are the relations between different action plans organized and structured in the brain to support our rich behavioural repertoire? Irina Barnaveli and Christian Doeller together with Simone Viganò and Daniel Reznik from the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences and with Patrick Haggard from the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience, University College London, argue in their recent study that the brain organizes action-outcome associations in a cognitive map-like structure. The researchers further demonstrate in their study, published in Nature Communications, that these cognitive maps, located in the hippocampal system, communicate with the motor system during action evaluation, suggesting that goal-directed action planning skills rely on multiple neural systems.
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Alongside Alzheimer's disease, changes to the brain's vascular system are the most common cause of dementia. So-called white matter lesions are indications of tiny vascular damage in the brain and can be measured in an MRI scan. They are very common in older people and are linked, for example, to slower thinking in everyday life. Using data from over 2,800 study participants over the age of 65, Frauke Beyer from MPI CBS in Leipzig, Germany, and Stephanie Debette from the University of Bordeaux in France investigated where such lesions occur in the brain, which factors favour their occurrence and how they are linked to stroke and dementia.
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In his new science communication book, which will be published by mvg-Verlag on April 14, 2025, Michael Skeide sheds light on how brain research debunks the biggest misconceptions and how we can really learn better. more