The competition is open to scientists who are 35 years old or younger. A committee of experts will choose the grand prize winner. All nominations must be received by June 15. The winner will receive 25 thousand dollars.

An American scientist won the Eppendorf & Science Prize for Neurobiology last year. Marlene Cohen is an assistant professor in the Department of Neuroscience and the Center for the Neural Basis of Cognition at the University of Pittsburgh. She studies how we use visual images to gather information about the world.

The Eppendorf award committee praised her work. The committee said it provided a new way to study how our mental activity affects what we observe and how mental processes such as attention are controlled.

Marlene Cohen and other researchers trained animals to take a test. The test measured their ability to recognize small changes taking place around them. The animals could see these changes if they examined nearby objects carefully.

The researchers studied nerve cells called neurons in the animals. Neurons process and send information through electrical and chemical signals. The researchers noted changes in the cells when the animals lost interest in an object. They said that when these changes took place, the animals did not perform well and the effect was huge.

As Marlene Cohen noted, “when the animals paid attention to the correct location, they could recognize a change about 75 percent of the time. When their attention wandered, they detected the change less than 10 percent of the time.”