16. January 2019 : Recent PhD thesis now available at the University library

We congratulate Dr. Benedikt Ehinger!

Last year Benedikt Ehinger successfully defended and published his thesis "Decisions, predictions and learning in the visual sense"; the PDF of his PhD thesis can now be downloaded from the university library here: https://repositorium.ub.uni-osnabrueck.de/handle/urn:nbn:de:gbv:700-20181116806

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

04. December 2018 : The world as an external memory?

New publication supporting the „the-world-as-an-external-memory“ postulation: memorization in a sensorimotor task seems less efficient than a visual check:

Melnik A, Schüler F, Rothkopf CA and König P (2018).
The world as an external memory: The price of saccades in a sensorimotor task. DOI:10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00253. Front Behav Neurosci 12:253

Theories of embodied cognition postulate that the world can serve as an external memory. This implies that instead of storing visual information in...

26. November 2018 : "Niedersächsischer Wissenschaftspreis" - Osnabrück CogSci among the laureates:

Viviane Kakerbeck, doctorate student of the Neurobiopsychology work group, was one of 4 students to be awarded the prestigious prize (worth € 3.500,--) for outstanding achievements in her studies. Read more:

https://www.uni-osnabrueck.de/kommunikation/kommunikation_und_marketing_angebot_und_aufgaben/pressestelle/pressemeldung/artikel/hohe-auszeichnung-studierende-der-universitaet-osnabrueck-erhaelt-niedersaechsischen-wissenschaftspreis.html
https://www.mwk.niedersachsen.de/startseite/forschun...

09. November 2018 : Use your body to measure ergonomics

www.ergovr.io

The Institute of Cognitive Science, as part of a joint research project, will support the designing process of ergonomically optimized workstations by using virtual reality.

Who is involved?
The NBP-lab with Prof. Peter König, @SP.VirtualSpice, and @fraunhoferidmt.
Funded by@bmbf.de

https://www.uni-osnabrueck.de/kommunikation/kommunikation_und_marketing_angebot_und_aufgaben/pressestelle/pressemeldung/artikel/ergonomic-workstations-coming-from-the-cyberspace.html

21. September 2018 : General commentary article in „frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience“:

The discussion has started! Can we infer the right moral behavior from behavioral experiments? Find the commentary and our response here:
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00128

Sütfeld LR, Gast R, König P and Pipa G (2018) Response: Commentary: Using Virtual Reality to Assess Ethical Decisions in Road Traffic Scenarios: Applicability of Value-of-Life-Based Models and Influences of Time Pressure. Front. Behav. Neurosci. 12:128. doi: 10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00128

10. September 2018 : To improve generalization, data augmentation outperformes explicit regularization

New publ.:
Hernández-García A and König P (2018).
Data augmentation instead of explicit regularization. arXiv:1806.03852v2 [cs.CV] [preprint posting].

Modern artificial neural networks have achieved impressive results with models of very large capacity. However, in order to improve generalization, explicit regularization techniques such as weight decay and dropout are used, leading to a reduction of the effective capacity.

Here, Hernández-García and König systematically analyze the role of...

05. September 2018 : Five arguments to test embodied cognition in the wild

„Embodied cognition“:
https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8311486/

An overview of 5 studies on (inter)actions in the real world - by P. König & lab cogsci.uni-osnabrueck.de/~NBP/

P. König, A. Melnik, C. Goeke, A. L. Gert, S. U. König and T. C. Kietzmann, "Embodied cognition," 2018 6th International Conference on Brain-Computer Interface (BCI), GangWon, 2018, pp. 1-4.
doi: 10.1109/IWW-BCI.2018.8311486

In this presentation-paper, Peter König et al. discuss embodied cognition in the human...

25. June 2018 : A closer look at group benefits in joint perceptual tasks: distributed control vs redundant control - a big difference for the group performance

New publ.:

Wahn B, Karlinsky A, Schmitz L and König P (2018). Let's move it together: A review of group benefits in joint object control. A mini review. DOI:10.3389/fpsyg.2018.00918. Front Psychol 9:918

When two or more individuals coordinate their actions to jointly control an object (e.g., carrying a table), they may reach a higher performance compared to performing the same task alone — a group...

19. June 2018 : Visual exploration habits of left-to-right readers are more difficult to predict. Why?

New publ.:

Afsari Z, Keshava A, Ossandón JP and König P(2018). Interindividual differences among native right-to-left readers and native left-to-right readers during free viewing task. DOI:10.1080/13506285.2018.1473542.Vis Cogn

In a free viewing task, humans differ in the spatial selection of fixation points. Native left-to-right readers tend to have a spatial preference for the left visual field. In comparison, right-to-left readers demonstrate a stronger variation in their visual exploration...

31. May 2018 : Are two heads better than one? – A review on group benefits in joint perceptual tasks, the influencing factors, and how to measure it

New publ.:

Wahn B, Kingstone A and König P. Group benefits in joint perceptual tasks: A review. DOI:10.1111/nyas.13843. ANNALS OF THE NEW YORK ACADEMY OF SCIENCES. Special Issue: The Year in Cognitive Neuroscience
nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/nyas.13843

Humans often collaborate in perceptual tasks to achieve a higher performance than performing the same task alone (i.e., attain a group benefit). In this review, Wahn et al. identify factors that influence collaborative...