Sibel Altikulaç & Smiddy Nieuwenhuis

We are Sibel Altikulaç and Smiddy Nieuwenhuis. We are both last year PhD candidates at the Developmental Psychology section at the Lab of Learning. The ultimate and overarching goal of all the projects in this lab is that children enjoy learning. To work towards this goal, we work in a diverse team so that we can cross boundaries between psychology, educational science, and cognitive neuroscience.

The general topic of our PhD is about the impact of mindset on motivation and learning behavior. We started our PhD in 2017 and followed first year students of secondary school until the third year of secondary school. We performed questionnaires, computerized tasks, and fMRI research in a subsample of these students. However, COVID-19 happened, and we couldn’t complete our data collection. Nevertheless, we still have collected a great dataset with lots of interesting data. A few months ago, we held two Q&A sessions for the participating adolescents and their parents to talk about the first findings of our research. Our first findings revealed that during a self-adapted challenging arithmetic task adolescents with a more growth mindset choose higher difficulties levels compared to students with a more fixed mindset. This was especially true for our male participants. Also, we found that the mindset continuum from a fixed mindset endorsement towards a growth mindset endorsement is much more complex than previously thought. For example, in a recent study we found that not only a fixed mindset profile and a growth mindset profile were prevalent, but also two other profiles with a mix of motivated behaviors, such as goal orientation, that are related to mindset.

We still have lots of longitudinal data to analyze. Also, we have performed imaging studies to better understand the underlying neural mechanisms of motivated behavior. However, we are in de middle of processing these data into meaningful interpretations. Hopefully you will hear from us soon with published articles.