Lower Saxony impulse professorship for developmental psychologist Manuel Bohn

Developmental psychology theories are often based on data collected in Western countries. ‘From a global perspective, however, we are the exception. The way children grow up in Germany is not the norm,’ explains Manuel Bohn. In order to better generalise scientific findings, the researcher is investigating the behaviour of around 300 children in three countries: Germany, Kenya and Turkey. The ‘A Global Developmental Psychology’ project compares the developmental trajectories of children and their everyday experiences. To do this, the girls and boys wear a camera waistcoat during the study, which records their behaviour, speech and surroundings. The film material is analysed using AI. ‘We are interested in what children know about language and how they use it to interact with others. The cognitive basis for this does not develop in a vacuum, but is heavily influenced by everyday experiences. We want to understand how and whether language development is similar in Germany, Turkey and Kenya. Children learn to speak everywhere in the world, but the pathways can be different,’ explains Manuel Bohn. With the ‘Niedersachsen-Impuls-Professur’ funding programme, the Lower Saxony Ministry of Science and Culture and the Volkswagen Foundation support the universities in Lower Saxony in attracting and retaining promising academic talent in the early stages of their careers for Lower Saxony as a centre of science. The maximum funding amount is two million euros.

Prof Dr Manuel Bohn completed his Master of Science in Psychology at the University of Vienna in 2013. In 2016, he completed his doctorate at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig, Department of Comparative and Developmental Psychology, where he remained as a postdoc until 2017. From 2017 to 2020, he was a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Language and Cognition Lab at Stanford University, USA, and at the Leipzig Research Centre for Early Childhood Development. Until his appointment at Leuphana University Lüneburg, Manuel Bohn worked as a group leader (Senior Scientist) at the Department of Comparative Cultural Psychology, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, Leipzig.