31. March 2021 : An open access toolkit for studies of traffic and automated driving in VR

Nosrat Nezami F, Wächter MA, Maleki N, Spaniol P, Kühne LM, Haas A, Pingel JM, Tiemann L, Nienhaus F, Keller L, König SU, König P and Pipa G (2021)
Westdrive X LoopAR: An open-access virtual reality project in Unity for evaluating user interaction methods during take-over requests
https://doi.org/10.3390/s21051879
Sensors 21:1879

With the further development of highly automated vehicles, drivers will engage in non-related tasks while being driven.
To investigate the crucial question of how...

24. March 2021 : New publication on embodied learning research. Training an agent in VR by deep reinforcement learning.

Clay V, König P, Kühnberger KU and Pipa G (2020)
Learning sparse and meaningful representations through embodiment
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neunet.20202.11.004
Neural Netw 134:23-41

How do humans acquire a meaningful understanding of the world with little to no supervision or semantic labels provided by the environment?

To answer this question, we investigated the influence of embodiment by means of a deep reinforcement learning agent that was trained before in a 3D environment with...

19. February 2021 : The next step to address the reproducibility crisis in EEG research:

Pavlov YG, et al. (2020). #EEGManyLabs: Investigating the replicability of influential EEG experiments. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/528nr. PsyArXiv

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardised analysis pipelines.
Driven by the desire to examine some of the...

15. February 2021 : How deep neural networks and style transfer help to understand the development of artistic styles:

Clay V, Schrumpf J, Tessenow Y, Leder H, Ansorge U and König P (2020).
A quantitative analysis of the taxonomy of artistic styles.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.13.2.5. J Eye Mov Res 13:2

Classifying artists and their work as distinct art styles has been an important, yet controversy-prone task of scholars in the field of art history.
Our project investigated differences in aesthetic qualities of seven art styles with state-of-the-art deep-learning methods. We conducted an eye-tracking...

27. January 2021 : New publication on transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS)

Schwab BC, König P and Engel AK (2020).
Spike-timing-dependent plasticity can account for aftereffects of dual-site transcranial alternating current stimulation.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.10.16.342105 bioRxiv

15. January 2021 : New publication on mood primed perception of our world

Czeszumski A, Albers F, Walter S and König P (2020)
Let me make you happy, and I’ll tell you how you look around: Using an approach-avoidance task as an embodied mood prime in a free-viewing task
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.09.09.289249 bioRxiv

Although emotional priming has been an important topic in research on top-down influences in overt attention, in particular regarding external and internal affective influences, there is little research using embodied primes.

In our eye-tracking...

11. January 2021 : New publication on spatial learning

König SU, Keshava A, Clay V, Rittershofer K, Kuske N and König P (2020).
Embodied spatial knowledge acquisition in immersive Virtual Reality: Comparison to map exploration.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.01.12.903096 bioRxiv

Investigating spatial learning in virtual environments allows studying different sources of information under controlled conditions. We built a virtual environment in the style of a European village and investigated spatial knowledge acquisition by experience in the...

02. December 2020 : New publication on the role of α-band activity in tactile stimuli processing

OssandónJ, König P and Heed T (2020)
No evidence for a role of spatially modulated alpha-band activity in tactile remapping and short-latency, overt orienting behavior
J Neurosci 40: 9088-9102

Oscillatory α-band activity is commonly associated with spatial attention and multisensory prioritization. It has also been suggested to reflect the automatic transformation of tactile stimuli from a skin-based, somatotopic reference frame into an external one.

Previous research has not convincingly...

25. September 2020 : VR-Projekt WESTDRIVE auf der Jobmesse Osnabrück

Auf der diesjährigen Jobmesse in Lingen, Osnabrück und Hannover ist auch die Universität Osnabrück vom Institut für Kognitionswissenschaft vertreten. Das junge Team, bestehenend aus Bachelor- und Masterstudenten unter der Anleitung von zwei Doktoranden, präsentiert zu diesem Anlass ein interaktives Experiment:
In Westdrive LoopAR wird in einer virtuellen Umgebung getestet, unter welchen Bedingungen der Fahrer eines autonom fahrenden Kfz am schnellsten und effizientesten wieder die Kontrolle...

13. May 2020 : New review paper on hyperscanning research:

Czeszumski A, Eustergerling S, Lang A, Menrath D, Gerstenberger M, Schuberth S, Schreiber F, Zuluaga Rendon Z and König P (2020). Hyperscanning: a valid method to study neural inter-brain underpinnings of social interaction. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2020.00039. Front Hum Neurosci 14:39

Social interactions are a crucial part of human life. Understanding the neural underpinnings of social interactions is a challenging task that the hyperscanning method has been trying to tackle over the last...