Leon Sebastian Behle

Leon completed his International Bachelor's degree in Psychology and pursued a research Master's in Cognitive Neuroscience at Leiden University. During his Bachelor's studies he spent a semester in New Zealand, studying philosophy and anthropology. His master's research focused on placebo-induced hallucinations and their associated psychophysiological responses, contributing to the understanding of how expectations can shape experience.

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My PhD research will investigate the factors that drive human curiosity by examining how individual differences, content characteristics, contextual elements, and their interplay influence our inclination to approach or avoid information. To this end, I am planning to employ methods such as self-paced reading, curiosity evoking trivia questions, or exploration games. To evaluate the outcomes, I will utilize various metrics such as explicit judgments, curiosity scales, event-related brain potentials, as well as emotion-sensitive peripheral measures such as pupil size and heart rate, to capture cognitive and emotional processes while minimizing socio-cognitive biases.

Fundamentally, I am interested in the question "What does it mean to be human and what are we supposed to do?". Central themes that I am passionate about are: Altered states of consciousness, morality and ethics, evolutionary psychology and human flourishing.

Besides his studies, Leon has gathered research experience assisting in an fMRI experiment on early visual processing at the Spinoza Center for Neuroimaging in Amsterdam. He also collaborated with Durham University on a cross-cultural psychology project in Uganda, where he conducted eye-tracking research on emotion recognition and audience effects. Additionally, he contributed to a project focused on examining placebo effects in medicine and how patient provider communication can be improved.

• April 2022. - 3 day workshop "Phenomenological Methods in Neuroscience & Consciousness Research" at the University of Zurich, Switzerand
• July 2024 - Birmingham-Leiden Summer School, Computational Social Cognition, Birmingham, England