Laura Fademrecht, PhD Student
Hometown: Reutlingen, Germany
Affiliation: MPI for Biological Cybernetics
What are you working on?
I am
investigating the recognition of another person's actions in
central and peripheral vision with a behavioral approach. I am
trying to understand the underlying processes in the brain that are
involved when we perceive the movements of another person.
How are you going to find out?
I use a virtual reality setup, a large panoramic screen. Thereby we
can simulate more realistic conditions (e.g. life size, far visual
periphery, human movements) than with a simple computer desktop (as
usually used for such experiments). Participants experience an
avatar that carries out different actions and report what they
recognized.
Why is it interesting?
The recognition of human actions is usually investigated in foveal
vision, which amounts only 2° of the visual field. In real life
however, we perceive actions usually somewhere around us and not
only at our point of fixation. If we want to know how we perceive
actions in real life, we need to understand how actions are
recognized throughout the entire visual field.
What's the most amazing thing you have found out
so far?
People are surprisingly good at
recognizing actions even in their far visual periphery, whether the
actions are dynamic or static (simply a static picture of an
action). The results of our studies indicate that the recognition
of actions in the periphery differs from object recognition, which
deteriorates faster towards the periphery.
