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We just published a new paper in the Journal of Vision The temporal dynamics of eye movements as an exploitation-exploration dilemma Ehinger Kaufhold & König, 2018 The highlights: We put eye movements as a decision process between exploitating the current view and exploring more of the scene We use gaze-contingent eye-tracking to control the When and Where of eye movements We find large effects of how long a subject fixates on their reaction time to continue exploring We find large effects of the number of possible future target locations (Hick’s effect) Check out the paper at the Journal of Vision…

Often when developing with psychotoolbox or psychopy/opensesame your program crashes. And I often then have a full-screen window open and cannot click somewhere else. I then try to Alt+Tab and execute “sca” (screen close all) into the matlab console, with often mixed success. Sometimes restarting the computer is the last option. Instead of restarting, a useful command in older ubuntu versions was: STRG + ALT + Backspace => restart X server (=> restart GUI). In order to activate this again use: setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp source on askubuntu     PS: I wrote this blogpost because I looked up this thing…

  From time to time I explain concepts and ideas to my students. Background Often this pops up in a statistical context, when one has a non-linear dependency between the to-be-predicted variable and the predictor-variables. By transforming the predictors, relationships can be made linear, i.e. a logarithmic (exponential, quadratic etc.) relationships can be modeled by a **linear** model. The idea I have a very visual understanding on basis-functions / non-linear transformation of variables in terms of stretching / condensing the basis (the x-axis here). This can also be applied to the generalized linear model (here for logistic regression). Imagine that…

Sometimes I need matlab/rstudio/spyder but with access to the university network. One way is to run matlab/rstudio/spyder on the university computers, but get the X (=Graphics) display on my local windows machine. Because there is a gateway in between, I first need to tunnel the gateway to a university working computer, then use a second putty session to ssh right through the tunnel directly to the target computer. These are the steps I need to do: – Putty: ssh to gateway.university:22;  Go to SSH-Tunnel and put source-port: 2222 (this is your local port you gonna target the second session). destination:…

From time to time I explain my students certain concepts. To archive those and as an extended memory, I share them here. We also recently had some discussion on vectorization in our research group. e.g. in python and matlab. With the second link claiming for-loops in matlab are performing much better than before.   Goal Show that for-loops are still quite slow in matlab. Compare bsxfun against vectorized arithmetic expansion in matlab against bsxfun The contenders good old for-loop: Easy to understand, can be found everywhere, slow arithmetic expansion: medium difficulty, should be general used, fast bsxfun: somewhat difficult to…

I got asked for the design of my academic posters. Indeed I have templates in landscape and portrait and I’m happy to share them. In addition I can recommend the blog better-posters which has regularily features and link-roundups on poster-design related things. In my newest poster (landscape below) I tried to move as much text to the side, so that people can still understand the poster, but it does not obscure the content. I also really like the 15s summary, an easy way to see whether you will like the poster, or you can simply move on. Maybe it even needs to…

We recently published an article (free to read): “Humans treat unreliable filled-in percepts as more real than veridical ones”. Inspired by Selim Onat and many others, I try to to explain the main findings in plain language. First let me give you some background: To make sense of the world around us, we must combine information from multiple sources while taking into account how reliable they are. When crossing the street, for example, we usually rely more on input from our eyes than our ears. However we can reassess our reliability estimate: on a foggy day with poor visibility, we…