29. May 2018 : Now out @eLife: Grid cells in entorhinal cortex fire without any change in space or in gaze position

New publ.:

Wilming N, König P, König S and Buffalo EA (2018). Entorhinal cortex receptive fields are modulated by spatial attention, even without movement. eLife 2018;7:e31745
https://elifesciences.org/articles/31745

Grid cells in the entorhinal cortex have been identified to encode an animal’s position in space, but have been hypothesized to play a more fundamental role in mental operations. A prerequisite for this is that they can be activated in the absence of movement. Here, we...

18. May 2018 : Congratulations to our alumna Petra Fischer

08. May 2018 : Minimizing harm at all cost—innocents, self-sacrifice and moral intuitions. This study reinforces the necessity of social debates on implementing moral values in autonomous vehicles.

New publ.:

Bergmann LT, Schlicht L, Meixner C, König P, Pipa G, Boshammer S and Stephan A (2018). Autonomous vehicles require socio-political acceptance — An empirical and philosophical perspective on the problem of moral decision making. Front Behav Neurosci 12:31.
https://doi.org/10.3389/fnbeh.2018.00031

This study examines the issue of implementing moral decisions in autonomous driving vehicles from an empirical and philosophical perspective.

In an empirical study, we investigated what...

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...