Movement in the eye of the beholder
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| Admission free |
| Ticket: Please book your ticket in advance online or at the box office in the foyer |
| Planning: Duration: 60 min |
| Suitable for: 14 years and older |
| Which languages: German |
| Venue: Humboldt Lab, 1st floor |
| Group size: max. 25 persons |
| Part of: Meet the Scientist |
The eyes are the Marco Polo of the human body — they travel incessantly across the visual world in front of us, curious for interesting or even insightful information. Tracking someone’s eye movements, therefore, provides insights into their perception and cognition — the eyes are indeed a window to the mind.
That eye movements are necessary for perception to occur in the first place was shown in experiments in the second half of the last century, when scientists showed that preventing eye movements (e.g., through paralysis or by stabilizing an image on the retina) leads to the rapid fading of perception within a fraction of a second.
In “Meet the Scientist”, Martin Rolfs will show demonstrations of how eye movements shape the input to the visual brain — imposing seemingly erratic motion onto the retina like the footage captured by hand-held cameras. He will suggest how the brain exploits the various sensory consequences of eye movements to serve continuous perception and behavior.
PRESENTER
Martin Rolfs is Professor for Active Perception and Cognition at the Department of Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin and member of the Cluster of Excellence Science of Intelligence. For his PhD work at the University of Potsdam he received the Heinz Heckhausen Award of the German Psychological Society in 2008. Before establishing an independent research group in Berlin, he worked as a researcher in Paris, New York, and Marseille. His research studies how visual action shapes active vision.
Carolin Hübner is a postdoctoral researcher in the Active Perception and Cognition group at the Institute of Psychology at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. She began her work there in the area of active visual perception in May 2021. She completed her doctorate at Philipps-Universität Marburg, where she investigated how visual information from before and after an eye movement can be integrated into a coherent perception. For her Master’s and Bachelor’s degree, she studied sensory and cognitive psychology at the TU Chemnitz.