Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann

Thinking about the world – what is, what might be, and what people believe to be the case – is a fundamental part of human life. In our mind’s eye, we do not only represent the real world but also its possibilities and how other people perceive it. For example, when we see a present, we can imagine that it may contain different things, but we also know that what we are thinking of need not be its real content. This may seem very natural to us, but it is no easy feat and first needs to be acquired in childhood. The ERC-funded project REPRESENT investigates how children develop the ability to think about the world in such abstract ways. Using state-of-the-art neuroscientific methods, Charlotte Grosse Wiesmann and her team will study how the brain represents possibilities and beliefs in parallel to the actual world, and how these representations change as children acquire the ability to reason about these concepts.