Professor Kristine Beate Walhovd will receive just over 19 million NOK over five years from the European Research Council (ERC). This comes as part of the distinguished Consolidator Grant scheme, awarded to strengthen the international standing of excellent research teams and to allow researchers to continue to develop an outstanding career in science.
She and her husband, Anders Fjell, are two of six Norwegian researchers who have received both the Starting Grant and the Consolidator Grant from the ERC.
This means that LCBC accounts for one third of two of the major ERC grants awarded in Norway.
Walhovd’s newly funded project concerns how factors such as those that occur early in life can impact upon changes in brain and cognition in later life.
The goal is to test how both inheritance and early environmental factors work together to regulate neurocognitive plasticity: the apparent changes occurring in brain and cognition as a result of experience over a lifetime.
Project title: Set to change: early life factors restricting and promoting neurocognitive plasticity through life
How your brain functioned when you were young predicts how your brain will function over decades.
We know that there are major individual differences in the changes that occur as we age, but also in our ability to, for example, benefit from training programs. Currently, we do not know why this is
Certain aspects pertaining to brain and cognition are partly inheritable, but we know relatively less about how genetics and environment interact in determining the benefits we reap through training the brain and cognitive functions.
To shed light on this, it is necessary to compare how the brains and cognitive functions of individuals with differing degrees of genetic and environmental similarity will respond to targeted training
Memory Training in VR
The new project will send participants into a world of virtual reality to put their memory and navigational skills to the test.