Time-to-contact estimation in context

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Heiko Hecht
• Subject Area: General, Cognitive and Mathematical Psychology
• Term: from 2008 to 2014
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 66270869

Many everyday actions require us to perform precise time-to-contact estimations. For instance, when attempting to cross a busy street or to hit a baseball we have to be able to anticipate contact-times with millisecond accuracy. The prominent perceptual theory in this field, tau-theory, assumes that the visual system exploits the relative expansion rate of the retinal object. During the last 10 years, researchers have systematically demonstrated that tau-theory is inadequate. Often simpler visual parameters are being used for time-to-contact estimation, as for example the object's retinal distance from the edge of the visual field. A new, adequate theory of time-to-contact estimation is still lacking. The proposed experi-ments seek to provide a basis for such a new theory, into which two aspects need to be incorporated: The visual and multisensory context on the one hand, and the nature of the task and the observer's perspec-tive on the other hand. The proposed experiments are designed to determine to what extent context fac-tors, be they relevant or irrelevant for the action, task demands, observer perspective etc. influence hu-man time-to-context estimation.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants