Adolescence is the transitional stage from childhood to adulthood. It is marked with physical and psychological changes, and profound structural changes in the brain. This period is considered the second sensitive period in human development after early childhood, when the brain opens up for learning and experience, and it is also very vulnerable for the absence of essential experience, and harmful environmental impact. If we would like to see the next generation to grow into healthy and talented adults, it is absolutely essential to understand the determining factors of this developmental stage. However, science is just as puzzled by teenagers asparents often are! There is no consensus on the role of experience, and the rate of pubertal changes in their abilities. While we are looking at developmental changes as a function of birth date (chronological age), there is very large individual variability in maturity (biological age) related to hormonal alterations. It is not known whether advancement in particular areas of life is linked to these hormonal changes or to the number of years teens had a chance to spend with learning about our world. We offer an entirely new way to ask questions about puberty and to clarify the above issues. We can clearly dissociate biological and experience-dependent factors in human adolescent development by assessing the biological age of a large sample of participants by a newly developed technique that determines their maturity level. By looking at psychological and brain development as a function of maturity versus chronological age, we are be able to provide the currently lacking crucial data on this important “window of opportunity.”

The prevailing view is that imagery is a weakened form of perception, and it is due to top-down processes within the cortical visual hierarchy. Aphantasia prompted researchers to find objective measures to asses imagery strength, and with the extended variability range it gave hope to find more precise neural correlates of imagery than ever before. In our current project we are debating the weakened perception view of imagery, and claim that imagery processes, ranging from very concrete visual imagery to abstract symbolic internal processes, are linked to the associative areas of the brain.

Sleep EEG methods in our laboratory include full night polysomnography, sleep architecture analysis, leg movement analysis, power spectral analysis of sleep, sleep depth analysis, sleep spindle analysis, brain synchrony analysis, source localization. With these methods and additional behavioral data collection we study the relationship between sleep and learning, and the development of sleep.

We look at the dynamic balance between perceptual stability and sensitivity under multi-stable visual stimulation in a ‘no-report’ binocular rivalry (BR) paradigm. Assuming that the adult pattern of dynamic balance is a result of experience-dependent development, we also analyse reversal sequences measured in pre-adolescents and adolescents.