Theses
All Master projects can also be offered as Bachelor projects in a shortened form. Please talk to the respective project supervisors.
Transmission of food preferences during social interaction
Rats modify their own food preferences adopting the preferences of other rats. We have demonstrated that damaging the Nucleus Accumbens shell abolish this behavior. Our next step is to evaluate whether dopamine and serotonin levels within the Nucleus Accumbens Shell correlate with the change in preference observed in the rats.
The students will be involved in animal handling and care, behavioral testing, and data analysis.
Supervisor:
Language: English
Psychopharmacological Effects on Decision-Making Behavior and Affect Misattribution
Acute stress has become an inescapable companion of our daily lives - whether it's due to a delayed train, a traffic jam, or an urgent deadline. As such, it is likely to affect everyday processes, such as decision-making. To investigate this, we will conduct a psychopharmacological study on the effects of stress on economic and moral decision-making behavior in the context of social decision-making. In addition, stress may also affect emotion processing. Therefore, we will also investigate the effect of the psychopharmacological manipulation on affect misattribution.
Supervisor:
Language: English or German
Teamwork: is possible
Prosocial Decision-Making in male rats
We try to investigate the underlying mechanisms of (pro)social decision-making in male rats by applying a Skinner-Box paradigm. Furthermore, social- and non-social reward tasks will be applied as a control for confounders. Additionally, dominance and hierarchy could be a relevant factor for the decision-making process and are investigated as well. To get a profound understanding about reward processing, we make use of a transgenic rat model with disturbed dopamine homeostasis (tgDISC1 rat model, Trossbach et al., 2016) and aim at targeted molecular manipulation (eg. lesions, disconnections, optogenetics).
The topic is available from winter term 2023
Supervisor:
Language: English
Choice Overload Effect in Prosocial Decision-Making
Choice overload refers to a phenomenon in which having many options to choose from negatively impacts decision-making, e.g., by decreasing choice satisfaction. This is influenced by various aspects of the choice environment, such as the complexity of the options. Thus, the presentation of a decision task may influence the behavior of decision makers in different choice modalities, such as prosocial choices. Using an online experiment, we aim to investigate the effects of choice overload on prosocial decision-making.
Supervisor:
Language: English or German
Teamwork: is possible