Perception and action behaviour

Humans perceive to move and move to perceive.

The research focuses on the perception and action aspects of visual cognition in a variety of domains. It is motivated by a conceptual framework grounded in the functional organisation of the brain that is sensitive to the dynamic interplay between neural plasticity and environmental stimulation.

Projects include the areas:

Human body movement

This is how people recognise motion information and interpret social signals from reduced visual patterns of kinematic body representations or visual animations.

Is it the location of information or the speed of the patterns moving that affords the recognition process or is it a linguistic driven interpretation about human movement?

How to understand the evolution of motion signals?

Emotions

This is how people recognize facial motions and interpret emotional signals from reduced visual patterns of facial representations or caricatures.

Of special interest is the detection and interpretation of threat.

Is a threat face recognized faster than other emotional faces? Is the threat effect based on perceptual or emotional features?

Causality and intentionality

This is how people recognise high-level and social concepts from simple geometrical motions.

How to make use of differences in the relationship of elements for its interpretation.

Sensorimotor integration (together with colleagues at Nuffield Orthopaedic Center, Oxford)

This is how people control simple actions and how visual input can lead to distractions during the execution of actions.

How is visual space represented and used during action control?

How do stroke patients compensate for spatial neglect in some cases? How can we improve rehabilitation?

Obsessional and compulsive actions (together with colleagues at QEII Hospital, Welwyn Garden City and University of Oslo, Norway)

This is how cognitive control of everyday actions such as checking and washing becomes impaired and which cognitive mechanisms are affected.

Research includes self-reports measured and specially designed experiments testing together emotions and thoughts.

Which cognitive processes are affected most prominently? Why do patients show a lack of control when performing some routine actions? How to shape new forms of therapy?