Projects

We find a very reliable but strange and peculiar effect! Humans treat filled-in information as more reliable than veridically seen ones!

Find the published paper in eLife here

Benedikt V. Ehinger¹, Katja Häusser, Peter König¹², Josè Ossandon¹

In this project we work on fixation durations with a newly developed paradigm. When your eyes are scanning the environment using saccades, you are in a constant decision process: Should I continue looking at the current thing to processes it better, or should I continue exploration of the scene? We are interested in this decision process and try to disentangle factors that influence the fixation duraiton.

You can find the current version of the preprint @ OSF

Benedikt V. Ehinger¹, Lilli Kaufhold¹, Peter König¹²

In this project we work with Melanopsin, a photoactive opsin that can be used for optogenetical experiments. This is collaborative work with the Herlitze Lab from the Ruhr-Universität Bochum. A first paper got recently accepted in Current Biology which characterizes two different melopsin subtypes. The first version of our modeling work has recently been published on bioRxiv (preprint). The manuscript is work in progress, I’m very interested in discussing our approach and the manuscript.

Benedikt V. Ehinger¹, Dennis Eickelbeck², Katharina Spoida², Stefan Herlitze², Peter König¹³

We investigate the blind spot in an online gaze-dependent eyetracking / EEG paradigm. We recently published our findings in the Journal of Neuroscience. We also gave a talk at the Vision Science Society. We had posters at the Statistical Challenges Conference in Warwick, the Donders-Discussions in Nijmegen and the Brain-Conference in Kopenhagen in May. We further had great Posters at the ECEM in Vienna and the MMN conference in Leipzig. I love to discuss our work on the blind spot and the resulting prediction errors and implications for predictive coding with you!

Benedikt V. Ehinger¹, Peter König¹², Josè Ossandon¹

 

We investiage mobile EEG correlates of spatial navigation, while altering the availability of kinesthetic and vestibular information.
Published on Frontiers in Human Neuroscience (2014)

Benedikt V. Ehinger¹,Petra Fischer¹, Anna L. Gert¹, Lilli Kaufhold¹, Felix Weber¹,, Gordon Pipa¹,Peter König¹²

This project was winner of the one week student project competition at the BCBT 2012 summer school.

 

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Introduction:

Not many studies exist, that measure deviation of subjects while walking an ideal line while beeing blindfolded. This study tries to gather data and get an estimate, how big the deviation at the end of a 3m walk is. We also try to modulate our subjects performance with adding online auditory feedback. We hypothesize that performance with visual feedback is near perfect, blind performance has a significant deviation, while auditory feedback helps the subject

We observe learning of novel classes of perceptual stimuli in an M/EEG study over more than 20 sessions.

Introduction

Everyday we use categories to interpret and act on our environment. Of course, this is necessary as we have to discriminate for example edible from poisonous food or friend from foe. Such representations are involuntarily and immediately accessible to our consciousness. How do new categories emerge in our brain? One way to study human category behaviour is to train humans to learn new classes by presenting different stimuli with some kind of feedback and analyse their behaviour. In addition to observing patterns of behaviour, electroencephalography (EEG) can be used to study the evoked electrical changes by different category based tasks in the brain.
Due to low level confounds, we see that a categorizing process into two categories is hard to distinguish from other neuronal processes. Therefore we need to find another paradigm to examine this process. We use an adaptation approach (c.f. Grill-Spector, Henson and Martin (2006)). This adaptation effect is used in various contexts, for example in fMRI, to distinguish different neuronal populations (Krekelberg, Boynton, van Wezel. 2006) or, as in our experiment, as a measurement of category membership.