Markus Huff

Leibniz-Institut für Wissensmedien | KMRC · Perception and Action Lab

Humans often falsely report having seen a causal link between two dynamic scenes if the second scene depicts a valid logical consequence of the initial scene. As an example, a video clip shows someone kicking a ball including the ball flying. Even if the video clip omitted the moment of contact (i.e., the causal link), participants falsely report h...

Humans segment the continuous stream of sensory information into distinct events at points of change. Between 2 events, humans perceive an event boundary. Present theories propose changes in the sensory information to trigger updating processes of the present event model. Increased encoding effort finally leads to a memory benefit at event boundari...

Visual narratives communicate event sequences by using different code systems such as pictures and texts. Thus, comprehenders must integrate information from different codalities. This study addressed such cross-codal integration processes by investigating how the codality of bridging-event information (i.e., pictures, text) affects the understandi...

With the recent surge in digitalization across all levels of education, online video platforms gained educational relevance. Therefore, optimizing such platforms in line with learners' actual needs should be considered a priority for scientists and educators alike. In this project, we triangulate logfiles of a large German online video platform for...

The concept of presence describes participants’ feelings of “being there” – in a mediated setting such as a virtual environment or a Hollywood movie. Consistently, it has been reported that higher levels of immersion (i.e. providing richer information) are related to higher presence levels. Immersion and presence are measured, asking participants t...

Having accurate knowledge about climate change has been shown to influence climatechange attitudes and behavior. However, due to an increase in online mediaconsumption, people are also confronted with much misinformation about climatechange. It is thus crucial that people use valid cues to infer whether information is trueor false, when to update t...

The issue of anthropogenic climate change is one of the most pressing challenges for society. Thus, the development of efficient strategies to increase the public's awareness of climate change is essential. Previous research has shown that one such strategy, consensus messaging, can correct peoples' misconceptions about their estimation of scientif...

Accounting for how the human mind represents the internal and external world is a crucial feature of many theories of human cognition. Central to this question is the distinction between modal as opposed to amodal representational formats. It has often been assumed that one but not both of these two types of representations underlies processing in...

Consensus messaging aims to increase climate change awareness by communicating the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. According to the gateway belief model, consensus messages improve the estimation of scientific consensus, which then causes subsequent changes in personal attitudes about climate change. Most studies investigating...

The concept of presence describes participants’ feelings of “being there” – in a mediated setting such as a virtual environment or a Hollywood movie. Consistently, it has been reported that higher levels of immersion (i.e. providing richer information) are related to higher presence levels. Immersion and presence are measured, asking participants t...

Consensus messaging aims to increase climate change awareness by communicating the scientific consensus on anthropogenic climate change. According to the gateway belief model, consensus messages improve the estimation of scientific consensus, which then causes subsequent changes in personal attitudes about climate change. Most studies investigating...

In this study, we investigated the nature of long-term memory representations for naturalistic audio-visual scenes. Whereas previous research has shown that audio-visual scenes are recognized more accurately than their unimodal counterparts, it remains unclear whether this benefit stems from audio-visually integrated long-term memory representation...

Surveys around the world show that the public perceives artificial intelligence (AI) as a double-edged sword: As a risk but also as an opportunity. However, if and how this ambiguous perception of AI relates to people’s willingness to use it has yet to be investigated. Thus, the present research investigated how people’s risk and opportunity percep...

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications are increasingly used in everyday life. Whereas some of them are widely accepted (e.g., automatically compiled playlists), others are highly controversial (e.g., use of AI in the classroom). While public discourse is dominated by perceptions of the risks associated with AI, we take a fundamentally different...

Although research showed that media consumption during COVID-19 is related to preventive behaviors, we know less about why people turn to quality or alternative media. We focus on the role of different fears. More specifically, we assumed that fears focusing on health threats were positively associated with the consumption of quality media and nega...

A substantial number of citizens in democratic countries believe in a political media dictate, the false assumption that governments decide what mainstream and flagship journalistic outlets may report or not. Two survey studies using national German samples (N= 590 and N = 1067) revealed that more than one third of the adult population believes in...

A substantial literature shows that public polarization over climate change in the U.S. is most pronounced among the science literate. A dominant explanation for this phenomenon is that science literacy amplifies motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret evidence such that it confirms prior beliefs. The present study tests the biasing account...

Research data availability contributes to the transparency of the research process and the credibility of educational psychology research and science in general. Recently, there have been many initiatives to increase the availability and quality of research data. Many research institutions have adopted research data policies. This increased awarene...

We investigated whether the confidence in lie detection judgments is a signal for the accuracy of judgments. We argue that previous methods in tackling this question are inadequate as the assessment of judgment accuracy and confidence is confounded with response bias and lie detection performance. We addressed this confidence-accuracy puzzle by app...

Filmmakers have established editing rules that aim to create cinematic continuity across filmic cuts, thereby avoiding viewers’ confusion despite the abrupt changes in perception. In our present project, we investigated the impact of 3D films, as opposed to 2D films, on the salience of filmic cuts. We employed a cut detection task and focused on wi...

Online phenomena like echo chambers and belief polarisation are believed to be driven by humans’ penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behaviour, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online b...

A substantial literature demonstrates public polarization over climate change, particularly among the science literate. The dominant explanation for this phenomenon is that science literacy amplifies directional motivated reasoning, the tendency to interpret evidence such that it confirms desired conclusions. However, the evidence regarding this bi...

Susceptibility to COVID-19 misinformation--believing false statements to be true--negatively relates to compliance with public health measures. Here, we make the prediction that metacognitive insight into the varying accuracy of own beliefs predicts compliance with recommended health behaviors, above and beyond the accuracy of these beliefs. In a n...

When processing information from multiple documents about a controversial topic, it is important to consider information about the respective documents’ sources. In two experiments, we investigated whether different ways of providing source information affects learners’ use of source information when trying to make sense of a controversy. Experimen...

Visual narratives communicate event sequences by using different code systems such as pictures and texts. Thus, comprehenders must integrate information from different codalities. This study addressed such cross-codal integration processes by investigating how the codality of bridging event information (i.e. pictures, text) affects the understandin...

Peer review has become the gold standard in scientific publishing as a selection method and a refinement scheme for research reports. However, despite its pervasiveness and conferred importance, relatively little empirical research has been conducted to document its effectiveness. Further, there is evidence that factors other than a submission’s me...

The comprehension of dynamic naturalistic events poses at least two challenges to the cognitive system: filtering relevant information with attention and dealing with information that was missing or missed. With four experiments, we studied the completion of missing information despite full attention. Participants watched short soccer video clips a...

Objective Mental models guide drivers’ expectations about the functioning of a conditionally automated vehicle. We induced different mental models using preliminary system descriptions to explore mental models with an objective, online measurement during conditionally automated driving. Background Human-machine interaction, based mainly on mental...

Peer review has become the gold standard in scientific publishing as a selection method and a refinement scheme for research reports. However, despite its pervasiveness and conferred importance, relatively little empirical research has been conducted to document its effectiveness. Further, there is evidence that factors other than a submission’s me...

Peer review has become the gold standard in scientific publishing as a selection method and a refinement scheme for research reports. However, despite its pervasiveness and conferred importance, relatively little empirical research has been conducted to document its effectiveness. Further, there is evidence that factors other than a submission’s me...

Im Rahmen der paEpsy 2019 Tagung haben wir im Rahmen des Symposiums "Open Science in der Pädagogischen Psychologie" den aktuellen Stand zur Publikation von Forschungsdaten in der Pädagogischen Psychologie vorgestellt.

Hollywood movies provide continuous audiovisual information. Yet, information conveyed by movies address different sensory systems. For a broad variety of media applications (such as multimedia learning environments) it is important to understand the underlying cognitive principles. This project addresses the interplay of auditory and visual inform...

Hollywood movies provide continuous audiovisual information. Yet, information conveyed by movies address different sensory systems. For a broad variety of media applications (such as multimedia learning environments) it is important to understand the underlying cognitive principles. This project addresses the interplay of auditory and visual inform...

Anbieterstatistiken sind eine wichtige Säule der fragmentierten Weiterbildungsstatistik. Der Beitrag erörtert die besonderen Voraussetzungen für die Entstehung und Nutzung der „Volkshochschulstatistik“ und der „Verbundstatistik“ als sogenannte freiwillige Anbieterstatistiken der öffentlich geförderten Weiterbildung, die in Zusammenarbeit von Weiter...

Human observers (comprehenders) segment dynamic information into discrete events. That is, although there is continuous sensory information, comprehenders perceive boundaries between two meaningful units of information. In narrative comprehension, comprehenders use linguistic, non-linguistic , and physical cues for this event boundary perception. Y...

Recent research presented evidence that producing gestures influences learning and knowledge representations. In this study, we investigated whether this beneficial effect of gesturing is increased for procedural learning tasks in that the motor context (i.e. producing gestures) is congruent during the learning and the testing phase. In Experiment...

Humans segment naturalistic actions into meaningful units. These are hierarchically organized: multiple fine events are part of a coarse event. We investigated how repeated practice of a virtual sequential assembly task influences learning of coarse and fine assembly steps. In Experiment 1, participants (N = 10) parsed the task into coarse and fine...

Objective We studied how system descriptions of conditionally driving vehicles (SAE International, 2014) influenced drivers' knowledge/mental model, trust, and acceptance. Background The increasing proliferation of assisted and conditionally automated vehicles urge a proper understanding of knowledge about, acceptance, and trust in the system. Up...

This paper presents a new approach called serious comics. It combines the long-term trend to infotainment, edutainment, and gamification with the rising importance of graphics in Web 2.0 and in science communication. Thereby, serious comics are understood in analogy to serious games. According to our definition, serious comics make use of the langu...

Previous research has identified multiple features of individual objects that are capable of guiding visual attention. However, in dynamic multi-element displays not only individual object features but also changing spatial relations between two or more objects might signal relevance. Here we report a series of experiments that investigated the hyp...

Humans segment the continuous stream of sensory information into distinct events at points of change. Between two events, humans perceive an event boundary. Present theories propose changes in the sensory information to trigger updating processes of the present event model. Increased encoding effort finally leads to a memory benefit at event bounda...

Object-based attention influences the subjective metrics of surrounding space. However, does perceived space influence object-based attention, as well? We used an attentive tracking task that required sustained object-based attention while objects moved within a tracking space. We manipulated perceived space through the availability of depth cues a...

Human observers are capable of tracking multiple objects among identical distractors based only on their spatiotemporal information. Since the first report of this ability in the seminal work of Pylyshyn and Storm (1988, Spatial Vision, 3, 179-197), multiple object tracking has attracted many researchers. A reason for this is that it is commonly ar...

We aimed at using simple judgments of event segmentation to reveal cognitive problems in workers with intellectual disability regarding their assembly performance. We investigated event perception and assembly performance in 32 workers (mean IQ = 64.4). First, we assessed their ability to segment activity into meaningful events. The task involved s...

Attitudes and motivations have been shown to affect the processing of visual input, indicating that observers may see a given situation each literally in a different way. Yet, in real-life, processing information in an unbiased manner is considered to be of high adaptive value. Attitudinal and motivational effects were found for attention, characte...

In everyday life, when observing activities taking place in our environment, we often shift our attention among several activities and therefore perceive each activity sequence piecemeal with temporal gaps in between. Two studies examined whether the length of these gaps influences the processing of the observed activities. Experiment 1 presented f...

Background. Human observers segment dynamic information into discrete events. That is, although there is continuous sensory information, comprehenders perceive boundaries between two meaningful units of information. In narrative comprehension comprehenders use linguistic, non-linguistic, and physical cues for this event boundary perception. Yet, it...

Attitudes and motivations have been shown to affect the processing of visual input, indicating that observers may see a given situation each literally in a different way. Yet, in real-life, processing information in an unbiased manner is considered to be of high adaptive value. Attitudinal and motivational effects were found for attention, characte...

This is a commentary to a target article in the Journal of Applied Research in Memory and Cognition.

Event Segmentation Theory (EST) explains the perceptual organization of an ongoing activity into meaningful events. Classical event segmentation task involves watching an online video and indicating with keypress, the event boundaries i.e., when one event ends and the next one begins. The resulting hierarchical organization of object-based coarse-e...

The dynamic environment of human observers requires continuous reallocations of visual attention in order to compensate for location changes of the attended objects. Particularly, situations with reduced spatial distance between targets and other objects in the display are crucial for keeping track of the target objects. In the present experiments,...

Multiple object tracking (MOT) plays a fundamental role in processing and interpreting dynamic environments. Regarding the type of information utilized by the observer, recent studies reported evidence for the use of object features in an automatic, low- level manner. By introducing a novel paradigm that allowed us to combine tracking with a nonint...

Earlier studies demonstrated that visual tracking of dynamic objects is supported by both scene-based and object-based reference frames, depending on the magnitude of scene displacement (Huff, Jahn, & Schwan, 2009; Liu et al., 2005). The current experiment tests if this pattern also applies to younger participants, i.e. school-age children, by comp...

The dynamic environment of human observers requires continuous reallocations of visual attention in order to compensate for location changes of the attended objects. Particularly, situations with reduced spatial distance between targets and other objects in the display are crucial for keeping track of the target objects. In the present experiments,...

Human long-term memory for visual objects and scenes is tremendous. Here, we test how auditory information contributes to long-term memory performance for realistic scenes. In a total of six experiments, we manipulated the presentation modality (auditory, visual, audio-visual) as well as semantic congruency and temporal synchrony between auditory a...

Humans understand film by representing its contents in situation models. These describe situations using several dimensions such as time, space, protagonist, and action. Changes in these dimensions cause discontinuities and are perceived as boundaries between two meaningful units at which the situation model has to be updated. Recently, we showed t...

Unlabelled: Behavioral and electrophysiological studies on bistable images helped to trace the boundary between what perception owes to early visual processing, and what cognition adds to it. They demonstrated that passive sensory processing can be actively modulated in a top-down manner. For example, knowledge and intentional control has been sho...

Unlabelled: Canonical-views for static objects are defined as preferred-views that provide richer spatial information and richer cognitive processing (Palmer, Rosch, & Chase, 1981; Blanz, Tarr, & Bülthoff, 1999; Ghose & Liu, 2013). For simple dynamic scenes consisting of three moving balls on a flat surface, canonical-views provide richer informat...

The assumption of the influence of fan preferences on the perception and evaluation of the gameplay can be traced back to the work of Hastorf and Cantril (1954) who examined the perception of college football games in a field study. According to Hastorf and Cantril, the memory of gameplay differed, depending on fan involvement, due to the fan group...

Warum verstehen wir Filme trotz der Unzulänglichkeiten der menschlichen Wahrnehmung sehr gut? Ist die menschliche Fähigkeit, Filme verstehen zu können, erlernt oder angeboren? Welche konkreten Wahrnehmungs- und Kognitionsprozesse laufen beim Filmschauen ab? Und in welcher Weise können Filme sinnvoll in Bildungsprozessen eingesetzt werden? In diesem...

Human observers are able to keep track of several independently moving objects among other objects. Within theories of multiple object tracking (MOT), distractors are assumed to influence tracking performance only by their distance toward the next target. In order to test this assumption, we designed a variant of the MOT paradigm that involved spat...

Does event perception alter perceived duration? Previous research has shown that the perceived duration of a short scene depicting a disk moving along a segmented path is reduced when the temporal order of the motion segments is reversed (Memento effect). This effect has been attributed to the idea that reversed segments give rise to the perception...

Working memory plays an important role for processing dynamic information and finally storing it in long-term memory. Recently, we showed that long-term memory for audio-visual dynamic scenes (short excerpts from Hollywood movies) emerges from integration processes. Memory was superior in case the audio-visual information was congruent (i.e. from t...

Many instructions of a motor task include visual and verbal information. However, verbal information presented after a visual event has been shown to influence memory. This study examined whether this effect applies for hand-manipulative motor tasks such as knot tying. Eighty-six naive participants learned to tie the archaic bowline. Subsequently,...

Humans understand text and film by mentally representing their contents in situation models. These describe situations using dimensions like time, location, protagonist, and action. Changes in 1 or more dimensions (e.g., a new character enters the scene) cause discontinuities in the story line and are often perceived as boundaries between 2 meaning...

Objects are not represented individually in visual working memory (VWM), but in relation to the contextual information provided by other memorized objects. We studied whether the contextual information provided by the spatial configuration of all memorized objects is viewpoint-dependent. We ran two experiments asking participants to detect changes...