06. April 2020 : New publication on VR application in scientific research and data acquisition:

Nezami FN, Wächter MA, Pipa G and König P (2020). Project Westdrive: Unity city with self-driving cars and pedestrians for virtual reality studies. DOI:10.3389/fict.2020.00001. Front ICT 7:1

Virtual environments will deeply alter the way we conduct scientific studies on human behavior. Possible applications range from spatial navigation over addressing moral dilemmas in a more natural manner to therapeutic applications for affective disorders. Until now, however, programming a suitable...

03. April 2020 : New publication on deciphering the communication routing in the human brain:

Finger H, Gast R, Gerloff C, Engel AK and König P (2019). Probing neural networks for dynamic switches of communication pathways. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1007551. PLoS Comput Biol 15: e1007551

Dynamic communication and routing play important roles in the human brain in order to facilitate flexibility in task solving and thought processes. Here, we present a network perturbation methodology that allows investigating dynamic switching between different network pathways based on phase...

01. April 2020 : New publication on the scalability and limitations of group performance:

Wahn B, Kingstone A, Czeszumski A, Labusch M and König P (2020). Dyadic and triadic search: Benefits, costs, and predictors of group performance. https://doi.org/10.3758/s13414-019-01915-0. Atten Percept Psychophys

In daily life, humans often perform visual tasks, such as solving puzzles or searching for a friend in a crowd. Performing these visual searches jointly with a partner can be beneficial. To date, it is unknown whether these group benefits scale up to triads or whether the cost of...

27. March 2020 : New publication on autonomous driving and related ethical questions:

Kallioinen N, Pershina M, Zeiser J, Nosrat Nezami F, Pipa G, Stephan A and König P (2019). Moral judgements on the actions of self-driving cars and human drivers in dilemma situations from different perspectives. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.02415. Front Psychol 10:2415

„Self-driving cars have the potential to greatly improve public safety. However, their introduction onto public roads must overcome both ethical and technical challenges. To further understand the ethical issues of...

23. March 2020 : New publication on the informative value of measurements in virtual reality vs. self assessments

Sütfeld LR, Ehinger BV, König P and Pipa G (2019). How does the method change what we measure? Comparing virtual reality and text-based surveys for the assessment of moral decisions in traffic dilemmas. doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0223108. PLoS One 14:e0223108

„The question of how self-driving cars should behave in dilemma situations has recently attracted a lot of attention in science, media and society. A growing number of publications amass insight into the factors underlying the...

20. March 2020 : New publication on joint decision making and its collective benefit:

Baumgart KG, Byvshev P, Sliby AN, Strube A, König P and Wahn B (2019). Neurophysiological correlates of collective perceptual decision-making. doi.org/10.1111/ejn.14545. EJN 00:1-21

Humans frequently perform tasks collaboratively in daily life. Collaborating with others may or may not result in higher task performance than if one were to complete the task alone (i.e., a collective benefit). A recent study on collective benefits in perceptual decision‐making showed that dyad members with...

13. March 2020 : New publication on spatial cognition and orientation learning in VR

König SU, Clay V, Nolte D, Duesberg L, Kuske N and König P (2019). Learning of spatial properties of a large-scale virtual city with an interactive map. doi.org/10.3389/fnhum.2019.00240. Front Hum Neurosci 13:240

"To become acquainted with large-scale environments such as cities people combine direct experience and indirect sources such as maps. To ascertain which type of spatial knowledge is acquired by which source is difficult to evaluate. Using virtual reality enables the...

13. March 2020 : New publication on eye-tracking

In recent months the Neurobiopsychology lab published some very interesting papers that we haven’t featured here so far. We will do so successively in the coming weeks, starting with this new publication on eye-tracking:

Ehinger BV, Groß K, Ibs I and König P (2019). A new comprehensive eye-tracking test battery concurrently evaluating the Pupil Labs glasses and the EyeLink 1000. https://doi.org/10.7717/peerj.7086. PeerJ 7:e7086

„Eye-tracking experiments rely heavily on good data quality of...

16. December 2019 : CogSci students accepted for Osnabrück’s Seedhouse accelerator program

Congratulations to our students Sumin Kim, Imke Mayer, Alexander Palatnik, Marc Viladrich  and Timon Jäger!

What started off as an interdisciplinary project in early 2019, is now gradually developing into a business start up. The basic idea was to use Virtual Reality to develop tailor-made therapies for different psychological disorders, e.g. alcoholism. The current focus is on treating eating disorders. First prototype results are already so promising that the project was recently accepted...

09. August 2019 : New publication on eye tracking and VR

Clay V, König P and König S (2019). Eye tracking in virtual reality. https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.12.1.3. J Eye Mov Res 12:3

The intent of this paper is to provide an introduction into the bourgeoning field of eye tracking in Virtual Reality (VR). It explores the methods and tools which can be applied in the implementation of experiments using eye tracking in VR following the example...