PhD for Johannes Kirchner

Our next speaker in the OCC Colloquium Series in the winter semester 2022 is Prof. Dr. Roland G. Benoit from the Max-Planck-Institute Leipzig
ATTENTION: Please note the day and room corrector.
This year's OCC Retreat was held at the Institute of Sport and Exercise Sciences on September 26th. The OCC PhD students presented the current state of their projects in twenty-minute talks each followed by 10 minutes of discussion. Again, the diversity of the covered topics within the field of cognitive and behavioural neuroscience was impressive (complete program). In the evening on Monday OCC members and PhD students had the traditional OCC BBQ with a lot of interesting discussions and interdisciplinary discourse.
Researchers from the Otto Creutzfeldt Center investigated the positive aspects of children's successful involvement with adventure. In the OCC Venture Camp 2022 elementary school students faced different challenges during their summer vacation, while the researchers measured the children's experienced fear by means of questionnaires and increased heart rates. For example, the children went up to a height of 7 meters with a lift truck. In another challenge, courage was required to look through VR goggles, where the children experienced a virtual thunderstorm, sat in a room with virtual spiders or rode a virtual elevator to a platform of a skyscraper to look down from there.
"Children increasingly have fewer opportunities to take risks in their everyday lives or at school," says Prof. Dr. Markus Junghöfer, who is the scientific director of the venture camp together with PD Dr. Marc de Lussanet. "This minimizes the risk of accidents, for example in school sports, but at the same time deprives children of many opportunities to learn successful strategies and self-confidence in dealing with scary situations.”
Even though the evaluation of the data is just beginning now, the children's feedback shows that the learned mastery of dares led to a significant reduction in the experienced anxiety and was experienced very positively. The long-term goal of the OCC researchers is now to be able to offer Venture Camps to all children as part of school field trips in Münster and to study their prevention of anxiety disorders in children in even greater detail.
With Marit Praetz we welcome the newest member in our OCC PhD Program. Marit Praetz says about her research project: "Insect navigation is widely studied in bees and ants and neuronal circuits and motifs are established for a part of these navigation strategies. Since working with fast flying organisms still is a methodological challenge, my PhD project will focus on locomotion of Drosophila larvae." The project is supervised by OCC members Prof. Dr. Christian Klämbt and Prof. Dr. Benjamin Risse. The PhD Committee is completed by Dr. Gerit Linneweber.
The new semester has started and we look forward to welcoming five outstanding speakers to the Neuroscience Colloquium of the Otto Creutzfeldt Center:
We welcome Prof. Dr. Christian Klämbt from the Institute of Neuro- and Behavioral Biology as a new member of the Otto Creutzfeldt Center in 2022.
Prof. Dr. Chrstian Klämbt works on questions about