07. May 2018 : A wonderful paper that explains well why we need obligatory ethics setting implemented in autonomous driving vehicles.

New publ.:

Faulhaber AK, Dittmer A, Blind F, Wächter MA, Timm S, Sütfeld LR, Stephan A, Pipa G and König P (2018). Human decisions in moral dilemmas are largely described by utilitarianism: Virtual car driving study provides guidelines for autonomous driving vehicles. Sci Eng Ethics
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11948-018-0020-x

Due to the necessity of implementing moral decisions in autonomous driving vehicles (ADVs), we conducted a set of driving experiments in virtual reality. The participants...

07. May 2018 : A new paradigm to control both fixation duration and location: The temporal dynamics of eye movements as an exploitation-exploration dilemma.

New publ.:

Ehinger BV, Kaufhold L and König P (2018). Probing the temporal dynamics of the exploration–exploitation dilemma of eye movements. J Vis 18:6,1-24
http://jov.arvojournals.org/article.aspx?articleid=2674777

When scanning a visual scene, we are in a constant decision process regarding whether to further exploit the information content at the current fixation or to go on and explore the scene. In this study, Ehinger et al. investigated how the experimental control of fixation...

26. March 2018 : Two perform better than the best individual without any information exchange & performance similarities predict the group benefit.

New publ.:
Wahn B, Czeszumski A, König P (2018). Performance similarities predict collective benefits in dyadic and triadic joint visual search. PLoS ONE 13(1): e0191179.
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0191179

When humans perform tasks together, they may reach a higher performance in comparison to the best member of a group (i.e., a collective benefit).

In this study, we investigated collective benefits for joint visuospatial tasks. We tested whether dyads and triads reach a collective...

26. March 2018 : Recent PhD thesis now available at the University library

We congratulate Dr. Andrew Melnik!

Last year Andrew Melnik successfully defended and published his thesis on "Sensorimotor processing in the human brain and in cognitive architectures". The PDF of his PhD thesis can now be downloaded from the university library here:

https://repositorium.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-2018032616723

For further details you may also contact Prof. Dr. Peter König (pkoenig@uos.de).

22. January 2018 : Stress induction with VR technology - investigating the potential of VR as a tool for reliable and realistic stress induction in laboratory settings

New publ.:
Petr Legkov, Krzysztof Izdebski, Silke Kärcher, and Peter König. 2017.
Dual task based cognitive stress induction and its influence on path integration.
In Proceedings of the 23rd ACM Symposium on Virtual Reality Software and Technology (VRST '17). ACM, New York, NY, USA, Article 41, 5 pages.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1145/3139131.3139172

Classic stress induction methods often don’t reflect real life scenarios because of technical limitations. For example, they do not take into account...

22. January 2018 : Store, stream and share: 1 tool for all gaze data for #VisualAnalytics.

New publ.:
J. Schöning, C. Gundler, G. Heidemann, P. König & U. Krumnack
Visual analytics of gaze data with standard multimedia players
Journal of Eye Movement Research, 10(5) : 1-14, 2017
http://dx.doi.org/10.16910/jemr.10.5.4

Eye-tracking data containing video stimuli, gaze trajectories, and other video-related data are usually stored in a diversity of formats. To visualize and analyze such data special software tools are needed, thus making it difficult for scientific exchange and...

16. November 2017 : „Virtual and Augmented Reality“

Development in the field of virtual and augmented reality is gradually taking up speed and could well advance to become the next top focus in cognitive science research for the coming years.

On 26 October the ICO InnovationsCentrum Osnabrück presented the "Treffpunkt Innovation 2017" with state-of-the-art information, discussions and demonstrations about VR & AR:
https://www.innovationscentrum-osnabrueck.de/ico/veranstaltungen/treffpunkt-innovation-2017/.

"Die Zukunft im Visier" summarizes...

14. November 2017 : "Open Access-Preis" awarded for the first time!

The University of Osnabrück has launched an award to honour »extraordinary open access publishing engagement«.

The first one to receive this new award is Dr. Basil Wahn from the IKW's Neurobiopsychology lab. Congratulations!

Please read the UOS press release for more details.

14. November 2017 : New publication on the limitations of visual processing

04. October 2017 : Top-down information influences eye movements quickly after movie cuts

How are eye movements affected by movie cuts? These two studies demonstrate the influence of top-down information, i.e. the task:
Valuch et al.
Seywerth et al.

These studies explored the task influence of on eye movements in dynamic edited scenes. When task relevant, matching regions across cuts are fixated earlier and more often. Participants with viewing intentions made more and earlier fixations on scene regions that matched across cuts, compared to nonmatching scene regions. However, in...