Nienke van Atteveldt

Nienke van Atteveldt
  • PhD
  • Professor (Full) at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

About

99
Publications
29,138
Reads
How we measure 'reads'
A 'read' is counted each time someone views a publication summary (such as the title, abstract, and list of authors), clicks on a figure, or views or downloads the full-text. Learn more
3,898
Citations
Current institution
Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam
Current position
  • Professor (Full)
Additional affiliations
June 2011 - December 2013
Netherlands Institute for Neuroscience
Position
  • Senior Researcher
September 2000 - November 2012
Maastricht University
Position
  • PostDoc Position

Publications

Publications (99)
Article
Full-text available
Being considerate of other people’s needs is an important way in which people show they care about others. Do young children pick up on this social signal? Across three preregistered studies (N = 254; 125 boys, 129 girls, 87%–89% Dutch), we investigated children’s evaluation of and behavior toward considerate and inconsiderate peers. An internal me...
Article
Full-text available
Peers, in terms of both friends and cooperation partners, are a very important aspect of the social context of adolescents. They may affect adolescents’ intelligence mindsets and therefore their school motivation and success. Being friends or cooperating with a peer with a similar mindset might either enhance (in case of a growth mindset) or hinder...
Article
Full-text available
Background The purported reciprocity between motivation and academic achievement in education has largely been supported by correlational data. Aims Our first aim was to determine experimentally whether motivation and achievement are reciprocally related. The second objective was to investigate a potential behavioural mediation pathway between mot...
Article
Full-text available
In a recent paper, while our overall conclusion remains valid, one specific finding—that there are reciprocal relationships between how Korean students value education, the time they invest in their studies, and their academic achievements—requires correction (Liu et al [...]
Article
This longitudinal study investigated whether classroom norm salience toward aggression moderated the association between parental education and children’s overt aggressive behavior development from third to sixth grade of elementary school. Children ( N = 1,205, 51% girls) from 46 Dutch elementary schools were annually followed from third to sixth...
Article
Full-text available
Achievement inequality has been on the rise. Globally, students from disadvantaged backgrounds perform worse academically than their peers, even with equal ability. This represents a significant loss of potential and perpetuates inequality. We organized this interdisciplinary Special Collection to uncover experiences that contribute to achievement...
Article
Full-text available
The field of developmental cognitive neuroscience is advancing rapidly, with large-scale, population-wide, longitudinal studies emerging as a key means of unraveling the complexity of the developing brain and cognitive processes in children. While numerous neuroscientific techniques like functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), functional near...
Article
Full-text available
Background According to Dweck's mindset theory, implicit beliefs (a.k.a. mindset) have an organizing function, bringing together mindset, achievement goals and effort beliefs in a broader meaning system. Two commonly described meaning systems are a growth‐mindset meaning system with mastery goals and positive effort beliefs, and a fixed‐mindset mea...
Article
Full-text available
This study investigated the neural basis of letter and speech sound (LS) integration in 53 typical readers (35 girls, all White) during the first 2 years of reading education (ages 7–9). Changes in both sensory (multisensory vs unisensory) and linguistic (congruent vs incongruent) aspects of LS integration were examined. The left superior temporal...
Article
In this longitudinal, observational study, following 883 adolescents (aged 11-15 years, grades 6th - 8th) we tracked changes in perceived school motivation and effort across four time points during the two years of remote education in Perú as a consequence of COVID-19 (retrospective reports before the pandemic, May 2020, July 2021, and November 202...
Article
Full-text available
Experiencing school burnout symptoms can have negative consequences for learning. A growth mindset, the belief that human qualities such as intelligence are malleable, has previously been correlated with fewer school burnout symptoms in late adolescents. This might be because adolescents with a stronger growth mindset show more adaptive self-regula...
Article
Full-text available
Many theories of motivation suggest that motivation and academic achievement reinforce each other over time, yet few longitudinal studies have examined behavioral pathways that may mediate interplay from motivation to achievement. Moreover, empirical studies so far have mostly focused on Western countries. In this study, we first examined whether s...
Article
Some number-naming systems are less transparent than others. For example, in Dutch, 49 is named “negen¬enveertig”, which translates to “nine and forty”, i.e., the unit is named first, followed by the decade. This is known as the “inversion property”, where the morpho-syntactic representation of the number name is incongruent with its written Arabic...
Article
Full-text available
Neuroscience research has increased our understanding of brain development, but little is known about how parents of adolescents engage with this neuroscientific information. Dutch parents completed a digital survey on neuromyths, neuroscience literacy and views of the adolescent brain and behaviour. These parents believed 44.7% of neuromyths and s...
Article
Full-text available
The COVID-19 pandemic negatively impacted adolescent mental health on a global scale. However, many students were resilient during this crisis, despite exposure to COVID-related stressors. We aimed to study the protective effects of growth mindset on school-related resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the mediating effects of coping styles....
Article
Full-text available
Growth mindset, the belief that personal attributes such as intelligence are malleable, has previously been related to more effort investment. Here, we investigated how undergraduates’ mindset (N=114) relates to the choice to invest effort during an arithmetic task, indexed by whether they make low versus high effort-related choices. Social cogniti...
Article
Full-text available
During school closures throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, less support from peers and teachers may have required more autonomous motivation from adolescents. Little is known about factors that could shield against these negative effects. Driven by two influential motivational theories, we examined how mindset, feelings of school burnout and the thre...
Article
Full-text available
Background: Although past research demonstrated growth mindset interventions to improve school outcomes, effects were small. This may be due to the theoretical nature of psychosocial techniques (e.g., reading about brain plasticity), which may not be optimally convincing for students. Aims: To address this issue and improve effectiveness, we dev...
Article
Full-text available
Background Most of the literature on the relation between mindset and effort depends on subjective self-reports, which may not reliably capture the actual investment of effort. In the current study we (1) operationalized mental effort as the chosen and executed difficulty level in a self-adapted arithmetic task, and (2) combined variable-oriented a...
Article
During adolescence, social cognition and the brain undergo major developments. Social interactions become more important, and adolescents must learn that not everyone can be trusted equally. Prior knowledge about the trustworthiness of an interaction partner may affect adolescents' expectations about the partner. However, the expectations based on...
Preprint
In this longitudinal, observational study, following 883 adolescents (aged 11 - 15 years, grades 6th - 8th) we tracked changes in perceived school motivation and effort across four time points during the two years of remote education in Perú as a consequence of COVID-19 (retrospective reports before the pandemic, May 2020, July 2021, and November 2...
Research
Full-text available
This is the first volume of the International Science and Evidence-Based Educational Assessment conducted by UNESCO's MGEIP. The first volume deals with education for flourishing.
Chapter
Full-text available
This is the Summary for Decision Makers (SDM) of the International Science and Evidence Based Education (ISEE) Assessment. The SDM presents the ISEE Assessment's key questions, findings and recommendations. The International Science and Evidence Based Education (ISEE) Assessment is an initiative of the UNESCO Mahatma Gandhi Institute of Education...
Article
Full-text available
The question of how learners’ motivation influences their academic achievement and vice versa has been the subject of intensive research due to its theoretical relevance and important implications for the field of education. Here, we present our understanding of how influential theories of academic motivation have conceptualized reciprocal interact...
Article
In cognitive neurosciences, fundamental principles of mental processes and functional brain organization have been established with highly controlled tasks and testing environments. Recent technical advances allowed the investigation of these functions and their brain mechanisms in naturalistic settings. The diversity in those approaches have been...
Preprint
Some students view their abilities as malleable with effort and aim to improve themselves (incremental beliefs), while others believe abilities are fixed and cannot change with effort and aim to prove themselves (entity beliefs). Here, we investigated how such ability beliefs in undergraduates (N=115) relate to their effort investment during a chal...
Article
Full-text available
Capturing developmental and learning-induced brain dynamics is extremely challenging as changes occur interactively across multiple levels and emerging functions. Different levels include the (social) environment, cognitive and behavioral levels, structural and functional brain changes, and genetics, while functions include domains such as math, re...
Article
Full-text available
As the field of educational neuroscience continues to grow, questions have emerged regarding the ecological validity and applicability of this research to educational practice. Recent advances in mobile neuroimaging technologies have made it possible to conduct neuroscientific studies directly in naturalistic learning environments. We propose that...
Article
Full-text available
The different ways students deal with mistakes is an integral part of mindset theory. While previous error-monitoring studies found supporting neural evidence for mindset-related differences, they may have been confounded by overlapping stimulus processing. We therefore investigated the relationship between mindset and event-related potentials (ERP...
Article
Full-text available
Objective: Recent findings suggest that diminished processing of positive contextual information about others during interactions may contribute to social impairment in the schizophrenia spectrum. This could be due to general social context processing deficits or specific biases against positive information. We studied the impact of positive and n...
Article
Full-text available
Education is indispensable for the flourishing of people from all backgrounds and stages of life. However, given the accelerating demographic, environmental, economical, socio-political, and technological changes—and their associated risks and opportunities—there is increasing consensus that our current educational systems are falling short and tha...
Preprint
Full-text available
The different ways students deal with mistakes is an integral part of mindset theory. While previous error-monitoring studies found supporting neural evidence for mindset-related differences, they may have been confounded by overlapping stimulus processing. We therefore investigated the relationship between mindset and event-related potentials (ERP...
Preprint
Full-text available
In cognitive neurosciences, fundamental principles of mental processes and functional brain organization have been established with highly controlled tasks and testing environments. Recent technical advances allowed to investigate those functions and their brain mechanisms in naturalistic settings. The diversity in those approaches has been recentl...
Book
Full-text available
Children go to school to learn, and learning takes place in the brain. In the age period of formal schooling, a child’s brain is still undergoing major developmental changes. For these reasons, neuroscience (the study of the brain) and education are closely connected. Learning is possible because the brain is plastic: plasticity refers to the capac...
Preprint
Previous research shows that some students view their abilities as malleable with effort and aim to improve themselves (incremental beliefs), while others believe abilities are fixed and cannot change with effort and aim to prove themselves (entity beliefs). Here, we investigated how such beliefs in undergraduates (n=115) relate to their effort inv...
Article
Important adolescents’ career-related decisions might be influenced by their beliefs about malleability of intelligence and learning (mindset). We combined quantitative and qualitative data to provide in-depth insights in the beliefs that 13- and 14-year olds hold about learning and intelligence, the factors influencing these beliefs, and the conse...
Article
Full-text available
Brain researchers used to study the workings of the brain only in special laboratories at universities or hospitals. Recently, researchers started using portable devices that people can wear on their heads outside of the laboratory. For example, these devices allow researchers to measure the brain activity of students in classrooms, as they go thro...
Article
Objective: Inaccurate and inconsistent response styles in attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) have been observed in a wide variety of cognitive tasks, in line with regulatory deficit models of ADHD. Event-related potential (ERP) studies of error processing have provided evidence for these models, but are limited in specificity. We aime...
Article
Full-text available
The special issue resulting from the 2018 Earli‐SIG22 conference reflects the current state of the field, the diversity of methods, the persevering limitations and promising directions towards solutions. About half of the empirical papers in this special issue that consist of three parts, uses behavioral, self‐report or qualitative measures to unde...
Preprint
Being able to adapt one’s trust behavior is essential for social relationships. In the current fMRI study, we first examined adolescents’ ability to adapt trust behavior and the neural mechanisms of trust. Second, we examined developmental differences by comparing young and late adolescents. Third, we examined how positions in a friendship network,...
Article
Full-text available
We propose a Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) framework to improve the alignment between mind, brain, and education (MBE) research, the educational practice, and other societal stakeholders. RRI is an approach that has successfully been used in different research fields, but not yet in MBE research. After substantiating the need for, and p...
Article
Full-text available
Over the past decade, important insights have been obtained into the neurocognitive development during adolescence. To better understand how these neuroscientific insights impact the real world, we investigated how neuroscience has shaped public perceptions of the “teenage brain” and if these perceptions influence adolescent behavior. When asking t...
Article
Full-text available
Modern neuroscience research, including neuroimaging techniques such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), has provided valuable insights that advanced our understanding of brain development and learning processes significantly. However, there is a lively discussion about whether and how these insights can be meaningful to the educationa...
Article
Full-text available
In alphabetic scripts, learning letter-sound (LS) association (i.e., letter knowledge) is a strong predictor of later reading skills. LS integration is related to left superior temporal cortex (STC) activity and its disruption was previously observed in dyslexia (DYS). Whether disruption in LS association is a cause of reading impairment or a conse...
Article
Full-text available
Integrating inputs across sensory systems is a property of the brain that is vitally important in everyday life. More than two decades of fMRI research have revealed crucial insights on multisensory processing, yet the multisensory operations at the neuronal level in humans have remained largely unknown. Understanding the fine-scale spatial organiz...
Article
Full-text available
The pedagogical beliefs (e.g., beliefs or “mindsets” concerning the malleability of intelligence) that teachers hold may have a far-reaching impact on their teaching behavior. In general, two basic mindsets can be distinguished with regard to the malleability of intelligence: fixed (entity) and growth (incremental). In this article, we present two...
Article
Full-text available
Many environmental stimuli contain temporal regularities, a feature that can help predict forthcoming input. Phase locking (entrainment) of ongoing low-frequency neuronal oscillations to rhythmic stimuli is proposed as a potential mechanism for enhancing neuronal responses and perceptual sensitivity, by aligning high-excitability phases to events w...
Article
Full-text available
An increasing number of healthy adolescents are consuming products that can enhance their cognitive performance in educational settings. Currently, the use of pharmaceuticals is the most widely discussed enhancement method in the literature, but new evidence suggests that other methods based on Transcranial Electrical Stimulation (tES) also have po...
Article
Background: Schizophrenia is an illness with devastating social consequences. Reduced interpersonal trust and the inability to pick up social contextual information have been suggested as important determinants underlying reduced social functioning in schizophrenia. During social encounters, healthy individuals derive a mental model of their intera...
Article
Full-text available
Sex differences in spatial ability are a seriously debated topic, given the importance of spatial ability for success in the fields of science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) and girls' underrepresentation in these domains. In the current study we investigated the presence of stereotypic gender beliefs on spatial ability (i.e., “sp...
Article
Stimulus categorization is influenced by oscillations in the brain. For example, we have shown that ongoing oscillatory phase biases identification of an ambiguous syllable that can either be perceived as /da/ or /ga/. This suggests that phase is a cue for the brain to determine syllable identity and this cue could be an element of the representati...
Article
Full-text available
Our understanding of how perception operates in real-world environments has been substantially advanced by studying both multisensory processes and “top-down” control processes influencing sensory processing via activity from higher-order brain areas, such as attention, memory, and expectations. As the two topics have been traditionally studied sep...
Article
Full-text available
The brain’s fascinating ability to adapt its internal neural dynamics to the temporal structure of the sensory environment is becoming increasingly clear. It is thought to be metabolically beneficial to align ongoing oscillatory activity to the relevant inputs in a predictable stream, so that they will enter at optimal processing phases of the spon...
Article
Full-text available
Deficits in motivational behavior and psychotic symptoms often observed in schizophrenia (SZ) may be driven by dysfunctional reward processing (RP). RP can be divided in two different stages; reward anticipation and reward consumption. Aberrant processing during reward anticipation seems to be related to SZ. Studies in patients with SZ have found l...
Article
Full-text available
Temporal cues can be used to selectively attend to relevant information during abundant sensory stimulation. However, such cues differ vastly in the accuracy of their temporal estimates, ranging from very predictable to very unpredictable. When cues are strongly predictable, attention may facilitate selective processing by aligning relevant incomin...
Book
Full-text available
Het brein heeft iets magisch. Het is het orgaan waarmee we de wereld waarnemen en dat ons gedrag aanstuurt en ons gevoel regelt. In de afgelopen tien jaar is bijna net zo veel hersenonderzoek gedaan als in de hele eeuw daarvoor. Je leest er dan ook overal over: ‘Een apparaat dat je kind beter leert rekenen’, ‘Hersenscanners vertellen of je liever C...
Article
Doel : In kaart brengen hoe kritisch en nauwkeurig Nederlandse kranten over wetenschappelijk hersenonderzoek schrijven, zodat gerichte aanbevelingen kunnen worden gedaan om communicatie over hersenonderzoek te verbeteren. Opzet: Media-analyse met codering op artikelniveau. Methode: Van alle krantenartikelen over hersenonderzoek uit 2008-2012 werd...
Article
Full-text available
The rapid developments in neuroscientific techniques raise high expectations among the general public and therefore warrant close monitoring of the translation to the media and daily-life applications. The need of empirical research into neuroscience communication is emphasized by its susceptibility to evoke misconceptions and polarized beliefs. As...
Article
It is considered unlikely that evolution selected specialized neuronal circuits for reading. Instead, it has been suggested that acquisition of cultural skills like reading is rooted in, and interacts with, naturally evolved brain mechanisms for visual and auditory processing. Here, we review how the learning of letter symbols interacts with brain...
Article
Research into the anatomical substrates and "principles" for integrating inputs from separate sensory surfaces has yielded divergent findings. This suggests that multisensory integration is flexible and context dependent and underlines the need for dynamically adaptive neuronal integration mechanisms. We propose that flexible multisensory integrati...
Article
To investigate how critically and accurately Dutch newspapers report on neuroscience, to provide specific recommendations for improving communication in neuroscientific research.
Article
Reading skills are indispensible in modern technological societies. In transparent alphabetic orthographies, such as Dutch, reading skills build on associations between letters and speech sounds (LS pairs). Previously, we showed that the superior temporal cortex (STC) of Dutch readers is sensitive to the congruency of LS pairs. Here, we used functi...
Article
Full-text available
Content and temporal cues have been shown to interact during audio-visual (AV) speech identification. Typically, the most reliable unimodal cue is used more strongly to identify specific speech features; however, visual cues are only used if the AV stimuli are presented within a certain temporal window of integration (TWI). This suggests that tempo...
Article
Potential sources of multisensory influences on low-level sensory cortices include direct projections from sensory cortices of different modalities, as well as more indirect feedback inputs from higher order multisensory cortical regions. These multiple architectures may be functionally complementary, but the exact roles and inter-relationships of...
Article
Temporal structure in the environment often has predictive value for anticipating the occurrence of forthcoming events. In this study we compared the influence of two types of predictive temporal information on auditory perception: (1) intrinsic temporal rhythmicity of an auditory stimulus stream and (2) temporally-predictive visual cues. We hypoth...
Article
Full-text available
Content and temporal cues have been shown to interact during audiovisual (AV) speech identification. Typically, the most reliable unimodal cue is used to identify specific speech features; however, visual cues are only used if the audiovisual stimuli are presented within a certain temporal integration window (TWI). This suggests that temporal cues...
Article
Potential sources of multisensory influences on low-level sensory cortices include direct projections from sensory cortices of different modalities, as well as more indirect feedback inputs from higher order multisensory cortical regions. These multiple architectures may be functionally complementary, but the exact roles and inter-relationships of...
Article
Full-text available
In contrast with for example audiovisual speech, the relation between visual and auditory properties of letters and speech sounds is artificial and learned only by explicit instruction. The arbitrariness of the audiovisual link together with the widespread usage of letter-speech sound pairs in alphabetic languages makes those audiovisual objects a...
Article
Full-text available
Learning to associate auditory information of speech sounds with visual information of letters is a first and critical step for becoming a skilled reader in alphabetic languages. Nevertheless, it remains largely unknown which brain areas subserve the learning and automation of such associations. Here, we employ functional magnetic resonance imaging...
Article
Full-text available
Efficient multisensory integration is of vital importance for adequate interaction with the environment. In addition to basic binding cues like temporal and spatial coherence, meaningful multisensory information is also bound together by content-based associations. Many functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) studies propose the (posterior) su...
Article
In addition to visual information from the face of the speaker, a less natural, but nowadays extremely important visual component of speech is its representation in script. In this review, neuro-imaging studies are examined which were aimed to understand how speech and script are associated in the adult "literate" brain. The reviewed studies focuse...
Article
Full-text available
Advances in functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology and analytic tools provide a powerful approach to unravel how the human brain combines the different sensory systems. In this perspective, we outline promising future directions of fMRI to make optimal use of its strengths in multisensory research, and to meet its weaker sides by c...
Article
Developmental dyslexia is a specific reading and spelling deficit affecting 4% to 10% of the population. Advances in understanding its origin support a core deficit in phonological processing characterized by difficulties in segmenting spoken words into their minimally discernable speech segments (speech sounds, or phonemes) and underactivation of...
Article
Full-text available
In transparent alphabetic languages, the expected standard for complete acquisition of letter–speech sound associations is within one year of reading instruction. The neural mechanisms underlying the acquisition of letter–speech sound associations have, however, hardly been investigated. The present article describes an ERP study with beginner and...
Article
Letters and speech sounds are the basic units of correspondence between spoken and written language. Associating auditory information of speech sounds with visual information of letters is critical for learning to read; however, the neural mechanisms underlying this association remain poorly understood. The present functional magnetic resonance ima...
Article
Recently brain imaging evidence indicated that letter/speech-sound integration, necessary for establishing fluent reading, takes place in auditory association areas and that the integration is influenced by stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA) between the letter and the speech-sound. In the present study, we used a specific ERP measure known for its aut...
Article
In alphabetic scripts, letters and speech sounds are the basic elements of correspondence between spoken and written language. In two previous fMRI studies, we showed that the response to speech sounds in the auditory association cortex was enhanced by congruent letters and suppressed by incongruent letters. Interestingly, temporal synchrony was cr...
Article
Full-text available
Temporal proximity is a critical determinant for cross-modal integration by multisensory neurons. Information content may serve as an additional binding factor for more complex or less natural multisensory information. Letters and speech sounds, which form the basis of literacy acquisition, are not naturally related but associated through explicit...
Article
The perception of objects is a cognitive function of prime importance. In everyday life, object perception benefits from the coordinated interplay of vision, audition, and touch. The different sensory modalities provide both complementary and redundant information about objects, which may improve recognition speed and accuracy in many circumstances...
Article
Full-text available
Most people acquire literacy skills with remarkable ease, even though the human brain is not evolutionarily adapted to this relatively new cultural phenomenon. Associations between letters and speech sounds form the basis of reading in alphabetic scripts. We investigated the functional neuroanatomy of the integration of letters and speech sounds us...

Network

Cited By