Center for Lifespan Psychology

Director: Ulman Lindenberger
 

Introductory Overview

Three Guiding Propositions
Collaboration Highlights
Grants and Awards (Selection)
Overview of Research Projects at the Center for Lifespan Psychology

Founded in 1981 by Paul B. Baltes (1939–2006; Delius & Lindenberger, 2025), the Center for Lifespan Psychology (LIP) pursues lifespan psychology, including lifespan cognitive neuroscience, as a distinct conceptual approach. The Center pays special attention to the age periods of late adulthood and old age, on the one hand, and the age periods of early and middle childhood, on the other. It hosts the Max Planck UCL Centre for Computational Psychiatry and Ageing Research, which is led by Raymond Dolan and Ulman Lindenberger. The Centre was founded in 2014, and is located in both London and Berlin.

LIP also continues to participate in the longitudinal Cognition, Brain, and Aging (COBRA) study, which investigates the role of dopamine in cognitive aging. COBRA is conducted in Umeå, Sweden, and involves scientists from Umeå University, the Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, the University of Gothenburg, and LIP.

Three Guiding Propositions

The Center's research agenda is based on three interrelated theoretical propositions. In line with general tenets of lifespan psychology, these propositions emphasize conceptual and methodological issues in the study of lifespan behavioral development and thereby provide the foundation for formulating research questions in specific domains of interest.

Proposition 1: Lifespan Changes in the Individual's Behavior as Interactions Among Maturation, Learning, and Senescence

The general goal of developmental psychology is to identify mechanisms that generate invariance and variability as well as constancy and change in behavioral repertoires from infancy to old age. By identifying the commonalities, differences, and interrelations in the ontogeny of sensation, motor control, cognition, affect, and motivation, both within and across individuals, developmental psychologists and developmentally oriented neuroscientists aim to arrive at more or less comprehensive theories of behavioral development. To provide explanations that qualify as psychological and developmental, the effects of agents external to the developing individual, such as educational policies, parents' affect attunement, teachers' classroom behavior, or a state's retirement policies, need to be mapped onto mechanisms and organizational laws that operate and evolve within individuals. Hence, as John Nesselroade, Peter Molenaar, and others have emphasized, developing individuals are the privileged system for description, explanation, and intervention.

Individuals organize their exchange with the physical and social environment through behavior (see Figure 1). On the one hand, the changing brain and the changing physical and cultural environment shape behavioral development. On the other hand, behavior alters both the brain and the environment. Hence, environment and brain act as antecedents but also as consequents of moment-to-moment variability and long-term changes in patterns of behavior. The components of this system, brain, behavior, and environment, are constantly coupled and cannot be reduced onto each other, as they jointly condition an individual's life trajectory through recursive self-regulation.

In attempts to explain the age-graded evolution of this system, maturation and senescence denote the operation of age-graded mechanisms and their effects on changes in behavior, which are especially pronounced early and late in life. In addition, learning, at any point during ontogeny, denotes changes in brain states induced by behavior–environment interactions. Maturation cannot take place without learning, and learning cannot take place without maturation. Similarly, the ways in which senescence takes its toll on the brains of aging individuals depends on their past and present learning and maturational histories. To complicate matters, processes commonly associated with maturation are not confined to early ontogeny, and processes related to senescence are not restricted to old and very old age. For instance, neurogenesis and synaptogenesis, which qualify as maturational mechanisms promoting plasticity, continue to exist in the adult and aging brain; conversely, declines in dopaminergic neuromodulation, which indicate senescence-related changes in brain chemistry, commence in early adulthood. Thus, maturation, senescence, and learning mutually enrich and constrain each other throughout the entire lifespan and must be understood and studied as interacting forces constituting and driving the brain–behavior–environment system. Psychologists occupy a central position in this endeavor because they possess a rich and adequate repertoire of experimental and methodological tools to describe and modify the organization of behavior. In particular, direct comparisons between children and older adults help to identify commonalities and differences in the mechanisms that drive child and adult development.

Key Reference

Proposition 2: Lifespan Theory and Methodology Need to Integrate Evidence Across Domains of Functioning, Timescales, and Levels of Analysis

Developmental psychology is faced with three challenging integrative tasks. First, there is the need to integrate theorizing and research practice across functional domains to attain a comprehensive picture of individual development. For instance, sensorimotor and cognitive functioning are more interdependent in early childhood and old age than during middle portions of the lifespan, and developmental changes in either domain are better understood if studied in conjunction. Similar observations can be made for many other domains of functioning whose changes have generally been studied in isolation, such as the ontogeny of social interaction and cognition; of emotion regulation and motivational states; or of memory, working memory, and attention.

Second, there is a need to understand the mechanisms that link short-term variations to long-term change. Short-term variations are often reversible and transient, whereas long-term changes are often cumulative, progressive, and permanent. Establishing links between short-term variations and long-term changes is of eminent heuristic value, as it helps to identify mechanisms that drive development in different directions. For instance, aging cognitive systems show a decrease in processing robustness, which may signal impending long-term changes in other characteristics of the system (see Figure 2). To articulate these different timescales, one needs to gather multivariate time-series data that capture short-term variability and long-term changes in cross-domain dependencies.

Third, to arrive at mechanistic explanations of behavioral change, there is the need to integrate behavioral and neural levels of analysis. At any given point in the lifespan, one-to-one mappings between brain states and behavioral states are the exception rather than the rule, as the brain generally explores and offers more than one implementation of an adaptive behavioral outcome. Therefore, ontogenetic changes in behavioral repertoires are accompanied by continuous changes in multiple brain-behavior mappings. Some of these remapping gradients may be relatively universal and age-graded, whereas others may be more variable, reflecting genetic differences, person-specific learning histories, the path-dependent nature of developmental dynamics, or a combination of all three. The resulting picture underscores the diversity and malleability of the organization of brain and behavior as well as the constraints on diversity and malleability brought about by (a) universal age-graded mechanisms associated with maturation and senescence, (b) general laws of neural and behavioral organization, and (c) sociocultural as well as physical regularities of the environment.

Proposition 3: The Exploration of Age-Graded Differences in Plasticity Is a Powerful Tool for Identifying Mechanisms of Development

Both from scientific and societal perspectives, plasticity, or the alteration of developmental trajectories through experience, is a precious phenomenon. Scientifically, inquiries into the plasticity of brain and behavior are rich sources of developmental information. Through the assessment of "changes in change," they offer the promise to observe the operation and proximal consequences of developmental mechanisms. For instance, studies in which research participants of different ages are instructed and trained to perform one or more cognitive tasks come with important validity benefits, such as (a) an increase in experimental control, (b) the identification of age differences near asymptotic performance levels, and (c) the assessment of transfer and maintenance effects. If neurochemical, neuroanatomical, and neurofunctional imaging measures are assessed before, during, and after training, intervention studies also offer new insights into relations between behavioral and neural manifestations of plasticity. By partly taking control over behavior–environment interactions, mechanisms of learning can be studied in the context of maturation and senescence.

From the larger perspective of societal evolution, cognitive intervention studies explore the range of possible development, or what could be possible in principle if conditions were different (see Figure 3). Hence, investigations of age changes in the plasticity of development carry the potential to explain and ameliorate the expression of human potential.

Collaboration Highlights

During the reporting period, the Center has continued and broadened long-term collaborations with scientists from other institutions.

Linking Lifespan Cognitive Neuroscience to Neurobiology

LIP has continued to expand its dialogue with researchers working on animal models (see ATLAS project). By fostering this dialogue, we hope to promote a mechanistic understanding of human behavioral development by strengthening the connections between neural and behavioral levels of analysis, in line with Proposition 2.

Recently, Hille et al. (2024) sketched out three complimentary ways tto bridge the gap between animal models and human research: (i) enhance the interpretability of macroscopic methods used in human research by complementing molecular and fine-structural measures used in animals with such macroscopic methods, preferably applied to the same animals, to create macroscopic metrics common to both examined species; (ii) launch dedicated cross-species research programs, using either well-controlled experimental paradigms, such as motor skill acquisition, or more naturalistic environments, where individuals of either species are observed in their habitats; and (iii) develop conceptual and computational models linking molecular and fine-structural events to phenomena accessible by macroscopic methods. In the coming years, each of these routes will be taken and explored. A special effort will be made to test the expansion-exploration-selection-refinement theory of experience-dependent plasticity (Lindenberger & Lövdén, 2019; see Plasticity project).

Currently, LIP is involved in two major cross-species endeavors. First, in collaboration with Tomás Ryan at Trinity College Dublin, the RHYME project has established a coordinated research program on the ontogeny of memory engrams in rodents and humans. Second, in collaboration with the Center for Environmental Neuroscience, the MPI for Biological Intelligence, TUD Dresden University of Technology, and Technical University of Munich, LIP researchers are investigating how experiential differences shape brain plasticity and behavior in humans and rodents, thereby contributing to the emergence of individuality (Freund et al., 2013). Both of these efforts have led to the formation of a new project in LIP, ATLAS, which is dedicated to bridging the gap between animal models and human work.

Key References

Gauging the Role of Dopamine in Human Cognitive Aging

Past work by LIP researchers has shown that age-related changes in cognitive abilities in adulthood and old age are dominated by a common factor of change, pointing to the need to search for domain-general drivers of adult cognitive decline. According to a longstanding hypothesis, age-related declines in neuromodulators, such as dopamine and noradrenaline, may contribute to general cognitive decline. Past work using positron emission tomography (PET) to directly assess dopamine receptor availability in humans has been cross-sectional, and did not allow for the assessment of change–change relations. More than a decade ago, colleagues in Sweden, together with researchers from LIP, launched the Cognition, Brain, and Aging (COBRA) study to overcome this lacuna. COBRA consists of a cohort of 181 older adults aged 64 to 68 years at baseline followed longitudinally over a 10-year period at five-year intervals, and includes PET assessments of D2/D3 dopamine receptor availability at each measurement occasion. Initial analyses focusing on 10-year changes have been published recently, demonstrating that longitudinal striatal dopamine losses are indeed associated with cognitive decline in healthy aging (Lundgren et al., 2025; see Figure 4). Future analyses will also include dopamine changes in limbic and neocortical systems.

Key Reference

The Role of Education in Adult Cognitive Development

The number of years of formal education is known to correlate positively with cognitive function throughout adulthood, and to predict lower risk of dementia late in life. These observations have led to two separable propositions: first, that prolonging education enhances cognitive function, and second, that education attenuates aging-associated cognitive decline. In 2020, Martin Lövdén and colleagues evaluated both propositions by conducting a comprehensive meta-analysis of the literature on educational attainment and cognitive aging. In agreement with the first proposition, there was clear evidence for a positive link between years of education and levels of cognitive functioning. However, contrary to the second proposition, associations between education and aging-associated cognitive decline were found to be negligible. Following up on this earlier work, LIP researchers participated in the analysis of 407,356 episodic memory scores from 170,795 participants older than 50 years, alongside 15,157 brain magnetic resonance imaging scans from 6,472 participants across 33 Western countries (Fjell et al., 2025). Data were provided by the population-based multinational Survey of Health, Ageing and Retirement in Europe (SHARE) and the Lifebrain Consortium. More education was associated with better memory, larger intracranial volume, and slightly larger volume of memory-sensitive brain regions. However, in line with earlier findings and the meta-analysis by Lövdén and colleagues, education did not protect against age-related decline, and did not weaken the effects of brain decline on cognition. These findings provide further support to the view that that cognition–education associations reflect factors present early in life, including but not limited to pre-existing differences among individuals to pursue more education.

Grants and Awards (Selection)

Martin Dahl received funding for the project, Fingerprinting the impact of declining neuromodulation on late-life memory, from the BrightFocus Foundation (2024–2026). Markus Werkle-Bergner and Christian Döller from the MPI for Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig were granted research funds by the Strategic Innovation Fund of the Max Planck Society for the project, Maturation in interaction? The co-development of cognitive maps and episodic memory within the entorhinal-hippocampal system (2023–2027). Ulman Lindenberger and Martin Lövdén from the University of Gothenburg received funding from the Strategic Innovation Fund of the Max Planck Society for their project, SYNAPSE: Observing synaptic density changes during human skill acquisition (2024–2026). Also, together with Simone Kühn, Tobias Bonhoeffer, Gerd Kempermann, and Franz Schilling, Ulman Lindenberger was granted funding for the project, WildBrain: Investigating Brain Plasticity Under Naturalistic Conditions in Mice and (Wo)men (2026–2029; see ATLAS project).

While working as a postdoc in the RHYME project, Chi (Zoe) Ngo was awarded an Emmy Noether Group from the German Research Foundation. Her group, RAVEN | Real-world Applications of Variability in Episodic memory and Neurodevelopment, was established as an independent research group at the Institute in June 2025. Zoe Ngo also received the Jacobs Foundation Research Fellowship (2022–2026). Furthermore, she was selected to join the first cohort of the Learning Variability Network Exchange (LEVANTE) with her project, Memory development in early childhood (2025–2029). LEVANTE is a global research initiative launched by the Jacobs Foundation in partnership with Stanford University. It aims at advancing our understanding of learning variability in children by developing the first global, longitudinal, open-access dataset on child development.

In 2024, Aaron Peikert received two awards of the Max Planck Society for his dissertation, Towards transparency and open science: A principled perspective on computational reproducibility and preregistration: the Dieter Rampacher Prize, which is an annual award for an outstanding dissertation completed by the youngest Max Planck doctoral candidate of the year, and the Otto Hahn Medal. In 2025, Aaron Peikert, Hannes Diemerling, Andreas Brandmaier, and Maximilan Ernst received the Institute's Open Science Innovation Award, and Sina Schwarze received the Otto Hahn Medal for her dissertation, The development of flexible behavior: Age differences and training-related changes in activation, connectivity, and neural representations during task switching. In the same year, Ulman Lindenberger was elected Fellow of the Royal Society as well as International Fellow of the British Academy.

Overview of Research Projects at the Center for Lifespan Psychology

In March 2026, the empirical and conceptual work at the Center was structured into six research projects (see Table 1). The research projects do not operate independently but inform and assist each other. For instance, in April 2026, the LIP research team, the Emmy Noether Group RAVEN, the Max Planck Research Group MR Physics, and the Scientific Technology and Computing Service Unit went on a four-day retreat to exchange ideas among each other and consult with invited experts.

The Interactive Brains, Social Minds project led by Viktor Müller came to a close by the end of 2023, and the Lifespan Age Differences in Memory Representations (LIME) project led by Myriam Sander was concluded in August 2024. The most recent change occurred in January 2026, when the Mapping Early Memory Trajectories Across Species (ATLAS) project was added to the portfolio of LIP projects to further foster cross-species work.

The specific activities pursued in the various projects cover a wide array of research areas in human behavioral development. For example, the following questions have been addressed during the reporting period: (a) Do age differences in memory generalization differ from age differences in memory specificity among children aged four to eight years (Buchberger et al., 2024)? (b) Does it make a difference in relation to behavioral and neural manifestations of cognitive control whether children engage in intensive task-switching training or in equally intensive single-task training (Schwarze et al., 2025)? (c) Does the number of different animals that older adults can name within 90 seconds predict their remaining years of life (Ghisletta et al., 2025)? (d) Can theories in the behavioral sciences be made findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable (FAIR) (Van Lissa et al., 2026), and for what reasons does preregistration increase the persuasiveness of evidence (Peikert et al., in press)? You will find our current answers to these and many more questions under Research.