Martin Lövdén

Martin Lövdén received his PhD from Stockholm University in 2002. After a one-year post doc at Saarland University, Germany, he spent three years as an international research fellow at the Center for Lifespan Psychology (director: Ulman Lindenberger), Max Planck Institute for Human Development, Berlin, Germany. Between 2007 and 2010 he headed an independent research group on behavioral and neuronal plasticity, which was funded by a Sofja Kovalevskaja award from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and hosted by the Max Planck Institute for Human Development. During that period he also held an assistant professorship at the Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden. After 2010 he held a position as senior research fellow, and was in 2014 appointed full professor, at the Aging Research Center, Karolinska Institutet.

Martin is now a professor at the Department of Psychology at University of Gothenburg.

Martin Lövdén does research in cognitive neuroscience, with an emphasis on the question of how experience shapes development brain and cognition in adulthood and aging. He approaches the interactions among behavior, brain structure, brain function, and cognitive performance with experimental (intervention) studies as well as with multivariate statistical modeling of naturally occurring between- and within-person variability and change. These two empirical legs are complemented by an explicit attention to research synthesis and theory development.

Projects (PI)

• Expansion-exploration-selection-refinement (ESR) theory of how the human brain acquires motor skill
• The causal effect of education on health in late life
• Temporal dynamics of adult brain plasticity: Effects of motor learning on brain anatomy and cognitive functions in adulthood
• Releasing the brakes of adult plasticity (REBOOT)

Selected publications

Wenger, E., Kühn, S., Verrel, J., Mårtensson, J., Bodammer, N. C., Lindenberger, U., & Lövdén, M. (in press). Repeated structural imaging reveals non-linear progression of experience-dependent volume changes in human motor cortex. Cerebral Cortex.

Lager, A., Seblova, D., Falkstedt, D., & Lövdén, M (in press). Cognitive and emotional outcomes after prolonged education: A quasi-experiment on 320 182 Swedish boys. International Journal of Epidemiology.

Köhncke, Y., Laukka, E. J., Brehmer, Y., Kalpouzos, G., Li, T.-Q., Fratiglioni, L., Bäckman, L., & Lövdén, M. (2016). Three-year changes in leisure activities are associated with concurrent changes in white matter microstructure and perceptual speed in individuals aged 80 years and older. Neurobiology of Aging, 41, 173-186.

Bellander, M., Bäckman, L., Liu, T., Schjeide, B. M. M., Bertram, L., Schmiedek, F., Lindenberger, U., & Lövdén, M. (2015). Lower baseline performance but greater plasticity of working memory for carriers of the Val allele of the COMT Val¹⁵⁸Met polymorphism. Neuropsychology, 29, 247-54.

Lövdén, M., Wenger, E., Mårtensson, J., Lindenberger, U., Bäckman, L. (2013). Structural brain plasticity in adult learning and development. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, 9, 2296-2310.

Kühn, S., Schmiedek, F., Noack, H., Wenger, E., Bodammer, N. C., Lindenberger, U., & Lövdén, M. (2013). The dynamics of change in striatal activity following updating training. Human Brain Mapping, 34, 1530-1541.

Mårtensson, J., Eriksson, J., Bodammer, N. C., Lindgren, M., Johansson, M., Nyberg, L., Lövdén, M. (2012). Growth of language-related brain areas after foreign language learning. Neuroimage, 63, 240-244.

Nyberg, L., Lövdén, M., Riklund, K., Lindenberger, U., & Bäckman, L. (2012). Memory aging and brain maintenance. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 16, 292-305.

Lövdén, M., Schaefer, S., Noack, H., Bodammer, N.C., Kühn, S., Heinze, H.J., Düzel, E., Bäckman, L., & Lindenberger, U. (2012). Spatial navigation training protects the hippocampus against age-related changes during early and late adulthood. Neurobiology of Aging, 33, 620.e9-620.e22.

Lövdén, M., Bäckman, L., Lindenberger, U., Schaefer, S., & Schmiedek, F. (2010). A theoretical framework for the study of adult cognitive plasticity. Psychological Bulletin, 136, 659-676.

Lövdén M., Bodammer, N. C., Kühn, S., Kaufmann, J., Schütze, H., Tempelmann, C., Heinze, H.-J., Düzel, E., Schmiedek, F., Lindenberger, U. (2010). Experience-dependent plasticity of white-matter microstructure extends into old age. Neuropsychologia, 48, 3878-3883.

Schmiedek, F., Lövdén, M., & Lindenberger, U. (2010). Hundred days of cognitive training enhance broad cognitive abilities in adulthood: Findings from the COGITO study. Frontiers in Aging Neuroscience, 2, 1-10.

Lövdén, M., Ghisletta, P., & Lindenberger, U. (2005). Social participation attenuates decline in perceptual speed in old and very old age. Psychology and Aging, 20, 423-434.