Max Planck Institutes and Experts

Around 1600, modern landscape painting blossomed as a distinct artistic genre. A research project at the Bibliotheca Hertziana explores the diverse ways in which Netherlandish artists in Rome contributed to this development. From the comparison of exemplary artistic careers, it becomes evident that the new perception of landscape did not only result from an intensive study of nature, but also from the cultural exchanges catalyzed by the experience of migration.

One of the main difficulties of communicating the urgency of a reduction in worldwide carbon emissions lies in the mediated way in which people and governments experience the dangers of a changing climate. We perceive the temperature and humidity of our immediate surroundings at a particular moment, but we lack any direct experience of the global environment. The working group Experiencing the Global Environment at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science strives to examine the history of this perceptual gap.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development investigate the time course of plasticity. Results show an initial increase followed by decrease of gray matter volume during skill acquisition. These plastic changes would have gone unnoticed, had a standard pretest-posttest design been employed. Such two-occasion designs are inadequate to identify the time course of plastic changes. Future research on human neuroplasticity needs research designs and theories that take the nonlinear dynamics of behavioral and cerebral variability and change into account.

In 2015, the Department of International Law and Dispute Resolution, under the supervision of Hélène Ruiz Fabri, began compiling the web-based Max Planck Encyclopedia of International Procedural Law (MPEiPro), in collaboration with Oxford University Press. The Encyclopedia not only aims at encapsulating the state of the art of legal and interdisciplinary research on international procedure, it also has the ambition of promoting cutting-edge research on what generally remains an underexplored realm of international practice.

Complex psychiatric disorders are thought to lie at the extreme end of an underlying continuum of behavioural traits. The opposite end of this continuum is embodied by milder symptoms that can occur in many of us. By studying social communication difficulties in the general population during the course of childhood and adolescence, scientists at the MPI for Psycholinguistics discovered recently a genetic overlap with factors affecting risk for autism and schizophrenia that is disorder-specific and developmentally sensitive.