12. July 2021 : Workshop on Computational Cognition

The COMCO 2021 workshop brings together experts studying the mind from a computational point of view for a better understanding of human and machine intelligence. Besides featuring top-class scientific talks and panel discussions this workshop also offers the opportunity to networking. Participants can present their latest research projects for a talk/ poster session.
The workshop will take place online, on September 23 – 24.

11. June 2021 : CogSci Startup LobVR könnte die Psychotherapie revolutionieren; die Aloys & Brigitte Coppenrath Stiftung und ein EXIST Stipendium ermöglichen weiteres Wachstum im Bereich FuE

Ende 2019 hatten wir bereits über das damals noch junge Startup LobVR berichtet. Damals hatten die Gründer Sumin Kim, Imke Mayer, Alexander Palatnik, Marc Viladrich und Timon Jäger einen Platz im Seedhouse accelerator program gewonnen.

Seitdem ist viel passiert, und LobVR ist auf dem besten Wege, sich als Firma zu etablieren. Das Potential für die weitere Forschung und Entwicklung ist enorm. Und mit großzügiger finanzieller Unterstützung durch die Aloys & Brigitte Coppenrath Stiftung und ein EX...

31. May 2021 : New publication on mood primed perception of our world:

Czeszumski A, Albers F, Walter S and König P (2021). Let me make you happy, and I'll tell you how you look around: Using an approach-avoidance task as an embodied emotion prime in a free-viewing task.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.604393. Front Psychol 12:604393

Although emotional priming has been an important topic in research on top-down influences in overt attention, in particular regarding external and internal affective influences, there is little research using embodied primes.

In...

28. May 2021 : Investigating gaze guidance behavior under VR conditions

Keshava A, Nezami FN, Neumann H, Izdebski K, Schüler T and König P (2021).
Just-in-time: Gaze guidance behavior while action planning and execution in VR.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.01.29.428782. bioRxiv

Eye movements in the natural environment have primarily been studied for common and repetitive tasks that require little attention once learnt. It is, however, unclear whether the same strategy is also applied, when the task is novel and involving a sequence of actions.
Here, we present...

31. March 2021 : An open access toolkit for studies of traffic and automated driving in VR

Nosrat Nezami F, Wächter MA, Maleki N, Spaniol P, Kühne LM, Haas A, Pingel JM, Tiemann L, Nienhaus F, Keller L, König SU, König P and Pipa G (2021)
Westdrive X LoopAR: An open-access virtual reality project in Unity for evaluating user interaction methods during take-over requests
https://doi.org/10.3390/s21051879
Sensors 21:1879

With the further development of highly automated vehicles, drivers will engage in non-related tasks while being driven.
To investigate the crucial question of how...

24. March 2021 : New publication on embodied learning research. Training an agent in VR by deep reinforcement learning.

Clay V, König P, Kühnberger KU and Pipa G (2020)
Learning sparse and meaningful representations through embodiment
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.20202.11.004
Neural Netw 134:23-41

How do humans acquire a meaningful understanding of the world with little to no supervision or semantic labels provided by the environment?

To answer this question, we investigated the influence of embodiment by means of a deep reinforcement learning agent that was trained before in a 3D environment with...

02. March 2021 : Cognitive Science-Studierende der Uni Osnabrück bringen Reclam-Band zu Alan Turing auf den Weg

Unter der Leitung von Prof. Dr. Achim Stephan und Prof. Dr. Sven Walter haben neun Masterstudierende des Cognitive-Science-Programms der Uni Osnabrück Alan Turings bahnbrechenden Aufsatz „Computing Machinery and Intelligence“ neu übersetzt und mit einem Nachwort versehen. Erschienen ist er in der Reihe Great Papers Philosophie des Reclam-Verlags.

19. February 2021 : The next step to address the reproducibility crisis in EEG research:

Pavlov YG, et al. (2020). #EEGManyLabs: Investigating the replicability of influential EEG experiments. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/528nr. PsyArXiv

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardised analysis pipelines.
Driven by the desire to examine some of the...

15. February 2021 : How deep neural networks and style transfer help to understand the development of artistic styles:

Clay V, Schrumpf J, Tessenow Y, Leder H, Ansorge U and König P (2020).
A quantitative analysis of the taxonomy of artistic styles.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.13.2.5. J Eye Mov Res 13:2

Classifying artists and their work as distinct art styles has been an important, yet controversy-prone task of scholars in the field of art history.
Our project investigated differences in aesthetic qualities of seven art styles with state-of-the-art deep-learning methods. We conducted an eye-tracking...

27. January 2021 : New publication on transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS)

Schwab BC, König P and Engel AK (2020).
Spike-timing-dependent plasticity can account for aftereffects of dual-site transcranial alternating current stimulation.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.16.342105 bioRxiv