| Erziehungswissenschaftliche Fakultät, Forschung, Personalia, Studium

From Tübingen to Thuringia: Welcome, Hauke Meyerhoff!

May we introduce? Hauke Meyerhoff. Professor Hauke Sören Meyerhoff - new Junior Professor for General and Instructional Psychology at the Faculty of Education at the University of Erfurt since 1 April. He comes to Thuringia from Tübingen, where he most recently worked as a research assistant in the "Realistic Representations" working group at the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media.

"For me, the position in Erfurt was just a wonderful fit," says the 38-year-old happily. Because I'm actually doing research in both general psychology and instructional psychology". In the field of general psychology, he is particularly interested in multimodal integration - the linking of sensory information from different sensory organs to form a coherent mental representation of the environment. And in the field of instructional psychology, he is interested in the interplay between cognitive offloading - the outsourcing of cognitive processes to external aids - and learning. Meyerhoff explains that this is particularly relevant in relation to digitalisation, as more and more such external tools are available.

He obtained his diploma in psychology in 2010 at the Eberhard Karls University of Tübingen and was later a doctoral student in the working group "Knowledge Acquisition with Cyber Media" at the Leibniz Institute for Knowledge Media. This was followed by a research stay at Yale University, New Haven, then - back in Tübingen - a doctorate (Dr. rer. nat.) and a further stay as a visiting scholar at Northwestern University, Evanston, in the USA. He then remained loyal to the Leibniz Institute as a research assistant - until today. The psychologist, who was awarded the Leibniz Association's Young Investigator Award in 2014, has also published numerous articles - including in high-ranking psychology journals - and has also acquired third-party funding in his field, including from the DFG.

Students can now look forward to his courses in general psychology in their entire range. "In the Bachelor's programme, I offer lectures on perception, attention, memory, learning, motivation, emotion, language, thinking and problem solving, action control - and also in-depth content on learning with digital media, such as 'cognitive offloading'."

And when he is not a professor? "Then I like to spend time with my two children (4 and 0 years old)," says Hauke Meyerhoff. "I also play piano and chess - when I get the chance." Well, we hope so and say: Welcome to the University of Erfurt!