Rico is a joint master’s student in Cognitive Neuroscience at Radboud University and Medical Engineering at Eindhoven University of Technology. He completed his bachelor’s degree in Biomedical Engineering at TU/e, starting to discover his interest for the brain. His thesis focused on discriminating brain activity patterns for different categories of visual stimuli.

For his master’s thesis at the LDM lab, Rico is working on the PRYME (acronym for Promoting Resilience in Youth through Mindfulness mEditation) study. For his internship, he is jointly supervised by Hanneke den Ouden and Bertalan Polner from the LDM lab and Guusje Collin and Maud Schepers from the PRYME team.

The aim of PRYME is to examine if a mindfulness based intervention is beneficial for help-seeking youth who are experiencing internalizing problems. Specifically, Rico’s project focuses on assessing behavioral action biases in aversive contexts through an escape avoidance task. The purpose of this task is to explore a correlation between aversive action biases and levels of internalizing symptoms.