TAO The active observer

• Applicants: Dr. Eli Brenner; Professorin Dr. Katja Fiehler; Professor Simon Rushton
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2018 to 2023
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 396902584

• Final Report Year: 2024

Final Report Abstract

We experience our environment by actively moving though it – i.e., humans are active observers. Self-movement causes a continuously changing retinal image which is used by the brain to produce a stable representation of the world, i.e., space constancy. But how does this work? Does the brain gradually build up a stable representation of space while we move? Or is this representation continuously updated during movement? Or does the brain generate multiple spatial representations, a variable and a stable one, which are flexibly used? In this collaborative research project we hypothesise that the answer depends on the requirements of the task. By combining complementary expertise from Psychology (Germany, Great Britain) and Movement Sciences (The Netherlands), we test these hypotheses in different tasks that put different demands on the active observer. Innovative technological advances such as virtual reality combined with simultaneous eye and motion tracking are used to research human behavior in naturalistic environments. Understanding the mechanisms of spatial stability can inform industry as well as medicine about conditions preventing disorientation or nausea when moving through real or virtual environments.

Publications

• Spatial coding for memory-guided reaching in visual and pictorial spaces. Journal of Vision, 20(4), 1.
  Karimpur, Harun; Eftekharifar, Siavash; Troje, Nikolaus F. & Fiehler, Katja
  
• Spatial updating of allocentric landmark information in real-time and memory-guided reaching. Cortex, 125, 203-214.
  Lu, Zijian & Fiehler, Katja
  
• The role of perception and action on the use of allocentric information in a large-scale virtual environment. Experimental Brain Research, 238(9), 1813-1826.
  Karimpur, Harun; Kurz, Johannes & Fiehler, Katja
  
• Further Evidence That People Rely on Egocentric Information to Guide a Cursor to a Visible Target. Perception, 50(10), 904-907.
  Crowe, Emily M.; Bossard, Martin; Karimpur, Harun; Rushton, Simon K.; Fiehler, Katja & Brenner, Eli
  
• Spatial coding for action across spatial scales. Nature Reviews Psychology, 2(2), 72-84.
  Fiehler, Katja & Karimpur, Harun
  
• Egocentric cues influence the spatial memory of landmark configurations for memory-guided actions.
  Forster, Pierre-Pascal; Fiehler, Katja & Karimpur, Harun