We use all our senses to construct a reliable and robust percept representing the world with which we interact. The view we
take in our group is that in many aspects of behaviour, motor actions and multisensory processing are inseparably linked and therefore
they have to be studied in a closed action/perception loop. We believe that human perception and action is tailored to the statistics of
the natural environment and when the environment changes our perceptions will follow these changes through the process of adaptation
minimizing potential costs during interaction.
In the neural processing such statistics will represent itself in
probability distributions. We follow Hermann von Helmholtz in our belief that human perception is a problem of inference, for which the
sensory data are often not sufficient to uniquely determine the percept. Thus, prior knowledge has to be used to constrain the process of
inference from ambiguous sensory signals. A principled way to describe the combination of prior knowledge with sensory data in a
probabilistic way is the Bayesian Framework. Therefore, we regularly use this Bayesian Framework to construct "ideal observer" models-models
that use the available information in the most optimal way, provided some task and cost function. These models can then be used as a
benchmark against which human performance can be tested. To do so in our group we use quantitative psychophysical and neuropsychological
methods together with Virtual Reality techniques. Quantitative psychophysical methods are important to best determine the relevant
perceptual parameters minimizing uncertainty and unknowns. Virtual Reality is important because it provides us with a tool to precisely
control the perceptual situation that are investigated, while at the same time it allows for a degree of interaction, which is necessary for
studying the action/perception loop. Often, however, today's Virtual Reality techniques and Human-Computer Interaction devices are not
sufficiently developed to be readily used in the study of human perception and action. Therefore, some of our work concentrates on the
development of human-machine interfaces. This is mostly done in the framework of European projects. For example, the European Projects
Touch-Hapsys and ImmerSence focused on the development of haptic interaction devices whereas the European project CyberWalk had the goal to
develop an omni-directional treadmill for enabling near-natural locomotion in Virtual Reality.
| Latest News |
15.12.2012 // Multisensory integration: when correlation implies causation
 |
In order to get a better picture of our surroundings, the brain has to integrate information from different senses, but how does it know which signals to combine? >> continue reading ... |
deutsch