Paula's Bio

So, I’m Paula and I’m in the Cognitive Science Track. Originally, I come from Bautzen which is a small town in Eastern Germany lying within the border triangle with Czech and Poland. I’ve always been interested in human thinking and I didn’t want to decide for just one aspect, so I spared me the hassle of choosing between humanities and natural science and did my Bachelor’s degree in the Cognitive Science programme in Osnabrück. As this has been the only Bachelor’s programme in Germany when I started in 2006, I moved to Osnabrück. It consists of eight different fields: Mathematics, Computer Science, AI, Neuroinformatics, Computational Linguistics, Philosophy of Cognition, Cognitive Psychology and Neurobiology. After three semesters of foundations I went more into the matters of Neurobiopsychology which now also forms my main area of interest. I’ve worked as a research assistant in that subsection of the institute, basically conducting EEG and eye-tracking studies (which was a great job). 
Additionally and as the basis for my Bachelor’s thesis, I did an internship in the Cognitive Psychophysiology Lab of Jeff Miller at the University of Otago in New Zealand (I can also recommend that to everyone, not just because of the country ;P). My thesis dealt with people’s ability of judging the time of their own mental events such as decisions. It raises a methodological problem for Libet and his reviewers. You might read the link or here in short: Libet et al. compared ERP onset times with subjectively estimated times and drew the conclusion - as brain activity preceded conscious awareness – that we don’t have conscious will. This became a huge debate, loosely referred to as “free will debate”, but it only follows from the assumption that people can estimate their own decision times reasonably well. I found out: they don’t. 
This topic leads me to ONE of thousands of exciting research areas, that is, decision-making. I fancy this area, but I am highly motivated to do anything else and I don’t want to restrict myself so early. So, I am open and – again – easily motivated for research (actual work as it teaches me most) in human (!) cognition WITH the brain.