Professor Dr Ulman E R Lindenberger FBA

Individual differences in human behavioural development across the lifespan, understood as interactions among sets of mechanisms related to maturation, learning, and senescence. Age-grades changes in brain-behaviour relations and plasticity.
Headsot of Professor Dr Ulman E R Lindenberger FBA
Fellow type
International Fellow
Year elected
2025
Honours
FBA
Sections
Psychology

Summary

German/Italian psychologist and cognitive neuroscientist Ulman Lindenberger was educated at Freie Universität Berlin, UC Berkeley, USA, and Technische Universität Berlin. Since 2003, he is Director of the Center for Lifespan Psychology at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin.

His work integrates maturation, learning, and senescence in an overarching account of lifespan cognitive development. In an early and highly influential series of studies, Lindenberger pursued programmatic research on the interconnection between cognitive, sensory, and motor functions in normal human aging.

Since then, his lifespan research program has uncovered age differences in the modifiability of behaviour, age changes and age differences in brain-behaviour relations, the role of neuromodulation and the importance of brain maintenance in human cognitive aging, and mechanisms that promote the emergence of individuality.

Through formal analysis, Lindenberger and colleagues showed that individuals need to be followed over time to identify causes of developmental change.

He plays a leading role in promoting advanced multivariate statistical techniques to study individual differences in change.

Lindenberger has published over 480 scientific papers and won several awards, including the 2010 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, the German National Academy of Sciences Leopoldina, and a Fellow of the Royal Society.

Current post

Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin Director

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