Basic Research

Multisensory perception: An important focus of our basic research in perceptual psychology is the investigation of how humans combine and integrate stimuli from different sensory modalities into a coherent multisensory perception. For example, humans integrate speech they hear and lip movements they see, enabling them to better understand spoken language, or objects can be better localised through the integration of vision and hearing. Because we are confronted with a large number of stimuli in many situations, it is initially unknown to our brain which stimuli were caused by an object and can therefore be integrated, or which stimuli come from different objects and should therefore be processed independently. Thus, our brain first has to infer which stimuli come from which causes. For example, at a party with many people, our brain has to infer which voices belong to which faces before it can integrate the lip movements we see and the speech we hear. Because causal inferences are fundamental to our multisensory perception, they are a focus of our research.

Further questions of our basic research:

• Influences of attention, social context and stress on multisensory perception
• Perception and representation of emotions
• Perception of faces
• Neuronal basis of reward processing

Research methods: To investigate principles of perception and their neuronal basis, we combine psychophysical behavioural experiments (e.g. visual, auditory or olfactory stimuli) with neurophysiological measurement and stimulation (e.g., electroencephalography – EEG, functional magnetic resonance imaging – fMRI and transcranial magnetic stimulation – TMS). In order to quantitatively describe perception and neuronal processing, we use mathematical modelling (Bayesian models) of behavioural and neurophysiological data.