Sarah van den Bosch joined the EPAN group as a PhD student in 2024. Supervised by Ivan Toni, Marlene Meyer, Karin Roelofs, and Sabine Hunnius, her research explores the interaction between emotional action control and referential communication using OPM-MEG. She aims to identify a unified cognitive process underlying both capacities, grounded in the concept of “alternative thinking”—a form of cognitive flexibility that involves managing dual representations of knowledge. Her project spans developmental stages from early childhood to young adulthood, providing insights into the developmental trajectory of alternative thinking during pubertal maturation.
Sarah obtained her research master’s degree in Behavioural and Cognitive Neuroscience from the University of Groningen, where she also completed her bachelor’s in Psychology. With a long-standing interest in cognitive development, she has been involved in teaching Developmental Psychology since her undergraduate years. During her master’s thesis internship at the BabyBRAIN lab, she investigated the rewarding effects of information gain in 8-month-old infants using facial EMG.