Anouk Glättli is a PhD candidate with a background in psychology and cognitive neuroscience. In her Master’s thesis, she sought to improve speech comprehension through electric brain stimulation (tRNS). However, since she is an advocate of self-efficacy and personal responsibility, she wanted to make it more challenging for her participants than simply allowing them to be passively stimulated in order to improve their skills. She also wanted to support more complex environments and populations, rather than just the safe haven of university students. To this end, in her PhD project, she is investigating the neurophysiological effects of cognitive training with and without physical exercise on executive functions in recruits of the Swiss Armed Forces. Furthermore, she is examining correlations between physical fitness and executive functions in cross-sectional analyses. Her PhD project is a collaboration between the DSBG and the Military Academy (MILAC) at ETH Zurich (https://www.vtg.admin.ch/de/dozentur-militarpsychologie-und-militarpadagogik) .

Generally speaking, she is particularly interested in how a person’s life can be made better through the use of their executive functions, and what behavioural changes (especially physical exercise and cognitive training) might increase the likelihood that their brain is able to use executive functions, particularly in complex environments. As Anouk is a skeptical person, she only trusts cognitive measurements if they are accompanied by EEG data.

Alongside her research, Anouk loves to train her executive functions through skiing, climbing, running, playing the piano, or socialising with friends.