Melanie Schmitz is a PhD student at Saarland University, Germany, in the International Research Training Group(IRTG) Adaptive Minds: Neural and Environmental Constraints on Learning and Memory. The IRTG is hosted by research groups from the Institute of Psychology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, China, and from the Departments of Psychology and Neuroradiology at Saarland University, Germany.

Melanie's research project is supervised by Prof. Dr. Dirk Wentura in Germany and Prof. Dr. Xiaolan Fu in China. The interest of her doctoral thesis is to examine the representation and activation of valent information within the semantic memory. For this purpose, Melanie and her grouuse variants of the affective priming paradigm and study behavioral as well as ERP correlates of the affective priming effect. This research project is a joint project with Sirui Wang who is a PhD student at the Institute of Psychology. Sirui Wang is also interested in the affective priming effect and deals with the use of Chinese ideographs in variants of affective priming tasks.

We believe that Melanie  will enjoy the part of  her PhD time she spend for the work in the group of Prof. Dr. Xiaolan Fu at the Institute of Psychology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing.