Max Planck Institutes and Experts

A team of researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology focuses on the many facets of small-scale trade in Vietnam today. Their work shows that markets form and transform in uneven ways through the interplay between global processes, local trajectories of economic and social development, and everyday interactions between traders, suppliers, customers, and public officials.

Historical spaces can be reconstructed only as conveyed by their representations in various media. In addition to selected case studies reconstructing pre-modern spaces in southern Italy and Naples, a project at the Bibliotheca Hertziana particularly addresses historical spatial constructions themselves. Investigating the interplay of several media that construct space, the project traces the historical process through which the spaces were collectively perceived and defined. The aim is to develop a dynamic model of space that situates art historical objects in a more nuanced manner.

The timing of developmental trajectories in language acquisition is paradoxical. Some milestones are reached very rapidly. For example, embryos are able to discriminate vowels already in utero [1]. Other milestones, however, like understanding grammatically complex sentences, are not even reached at the primary school age. What is the reason for this? Current neurobiological findings suggest that a brain network involved in processing grammatical information has to reach an adult-level maturity until it can provide its full function.

Banks typically grant long-term loans, but their liabilities are short-term. While this maturity transformation is one of the main features of banks, it also constitutes a major risk factor. A research project at the Max Planck Institute for Research on Collective Goods shows that a strong government can reduce the refinancing risk of banks by providing them with government bonds. In case of countries that are financially interconnected, all parties might benefit if the strong country protects weaker ones by forming a banking union.

Information processing in mammalian brains requires exceptional coordination of neural activity ranging from local groups of cells to brain wide interactions. To bridge these scales and understand brain function at the system level, we investigate the relationship between action potentials, local field potentials, and blood oxygen level dependent activity in various structures. The development of simultaneous recordings methodologies and data analysis techniques enables us to characterize the brain states associated to memory functions.