Visuo-spatial cognition

Basic data for this project

Description

“Visuo-spatial cognition” is a cooperative project, whose objective is to achieve a better understanding of how the visual representation of the environment is generated in the brain. The project starts from the assumption that perception is an active process, which operates on the visual input in conjunction with motor and cognitive signals. The project adopts many different methodical approaches in interdisciplinary cooperation. Psychophysical studies in patients with brain lesion and healthy controls are combined with functional neuro-imaging and computational modeling, so that the main question can be answered from different points of view. Markus Lappe's workgroup investigates spatial aspects of active scene cognition. They study the role of attention, anticipation, and decision on spatial localization across eye movements, and investigate the metric of the spatial representation by separating visual and motor signals through saccadic adaptation. Furthermore, they investigate the contribution of context to visuo-spatial scene cognition by analyzing visual search behavior in gaze contingent and virtual reality displays.