Peter König

Osnabrück University | UOS · Institute of Cognitive Science

Concepts of spatial navigation rest on the idea of landmarks, which are immobile features or objects in the environment. However, behaviorally relevant objects or fellow humans are often mobile. This raises the question of how the presence of human agents influences spatial exploration and knowledge acquisition. Here, we investigate exploration and...

Introduction Approach and avoidance behaviors have been extensively studied in cognitive science as a fundamental aspect of human motivation and decision-making. The Approach-Avoidance Bias (AAB) refers to the tendency to approach positive stimuli faster than negative stimuli and to avoid negative stimuli faster than positive ones. Affect and arous...

Current research strives to investigate cognitive processes under natural conditions. Virtual reality and EEG are promising techniques combining naturalistic settings with close experimental control. However, many questions and technical challenges remain, e.g., are fixation or saccade onsets a suitable replacement as key events in continuous gaze...

Background Approach and avoidance bias (AAB) describes automatic behavioral tendencies to react toward environmental stimuli regarding their emotional valence. Traditional setups have provided evidence but often lack ecological validity. The study of the AAB in naturalistic contexts has recently increased, revealing significant methodological chall...

Natural eye movements have primarily been studied for over-learned activities such as tea-making, sandwich-making, and hand-washing, which have a fixed sequence of associated actions. These studies demonstrate a sequential activation of low-level cognitive schemas facilitating task completion. However, whether these action schemas are activated in...

Following the offset of complex visual stimuli, rich stimulus information remains briefly available to the observer, reflecting a rapidly decaying iconic memory trace. Traditionally, iconic memory decay is assumed to begin with stimulus offset. Instead, here we found that available information begins decaying already when cues are presented in the...

Semi-autonomous vehicles (AVs) enable drivers to engage in non-driving tasks but require them to be ready to take control during critical situations. This “out-of-the-loop” problem demands a quick transition to active information processing, raising safety concerns and anxiety. Multimodal signals in AVs aim to deliver take-over requests and facilit...

Pinpointing elements on large tactile surfaces is challenging for individuals with blindness and visual impairment (BVI) seeking to access two-dimensional (2D) information. This is particularly evident when using 2D tactile readers, devices designed to provide 2D information using static tactile representations with audio explanations. Traditional...

Semi-autonomous vehicles (AVs) enable drivers to engage in non-driving tasks but require them to be ready to take control during critical situations. This "out-of-the-loop" problem demands a quick transition to active information processing, raising safety concerns and anxiety. Multimodal signals in AVs aim to deliver take-over requests and facilit...

By augmenting sensory perception through technology, researchers study how humans use and perceive the novel sensory input provided. Nevertheless, little is known about how learning unfolds over time. To this end, 27 participants trained with an augmentation device (feelSpace belt), which provides tactile feedback about the direction of the cardina...

Extensive research conducted in controlled laboratory settings has prompted an inquiry into how results can be generalized to real-world situations influenced by the subjects' actions. Virtual reality lends itself ideally to investigating complex situations but requires accurate classification of eye movements, especially when combining it with tim...

The proxemics theory explains the consistent social boundaries surrounding individuals (Hall, 1966), yet little is known about the social boundaries surrounding pairs or groups of people. The current study explored interpersonal proxemics behavior in a virtual environment, focusing on distances maintained towards individual pedestrians, pairs, and...

The problem of supporting visually impaired and blind people in meaningful interactions with objects is often neglected. To address this issue, we adapted a tactile belt for enhanced spatial navigation into a bracelet worn on the wrist that allows visually impaired people to grasp target objects. Participants’ performance in locating and grasping t...

How do we interact with our environment and make decisions about the world around us? Empirical research using psychophysical tasks has demonstrated that our perceptual decisions are influenced by past choices, a phenomenon known as the “choice history bias” effect. This decision-making process suggests that the brain adapts to environmental uncert...

Extensive research conducted in controlled laboratory settings has prompted an inquiry into how results can be generalized to real-world situations influenced by the subjects' actions. Virtual reality lends itself ideally to investigating complex situations but requires accurate classification of eye movements, especially when combining it with tim...

Understanding how eyes, head, and hands coordinate in natural contexts is a critical challenge in visuomotor coordination research, often limited by sedentary tasks or constrained settings. To address this gap, we conducted an experiment where participants proactively performed pick-and-place actions on a life-size shelf in a virtual environment an...

Natural eye movements have primarily been studied for over-learned activities such as tea-making, sandwich-making, and hand-washing, which have a fixed sequence of associated actions. These studies indicate a sequential activation of low-level cognitive schemas facilitating task completion. However, it is unclear if these action schemas are activat...

This paper aims to compare a new webcam-based eye-tracking system, integrated into the Labvanced platform for online experiments, to a “gold standard” lab-based eye tracker (EyeLink 1000 - SR Research). Specifically, we simultaneously recorded data with both eye trackers in five different tasks, analyzing their real-time performance. These tasks we...

Most artificial neural networks used for object recognition are trained in a fully supervised setup. This is not only resource consuming as it requires large data sets of labeled examples but also quite different from how humans learn. We use a setup in which an artificial agent first learns in a simulated world through self-supervised, curiosity-d...

In everyday life, people often work together to accomplish a joint goal. Working together is often beneficial as it can result in a higher performance compared to working alone - a so-called "group benefit". While several factors influencing group benefits have been investigated in a range of tasks, to date, they have not been examined collectively...

Sensory augmentation provides novel opportunities to broaden our knowledge of human perception through external sensors that record and transmit information beyond natural perception. To assess whether such augmented senses affect the acquisition of spatial knowledge during navigation, we trained a group of 27 participants for six weeks with an aug...

Visual attention is mainly goal-directed and allocated based on the upcoming action. However, it is unclear how far this feature of gaze behavior generalizes in more naturalistic settings. The present study investigates the influence of action affordances on active inference processes revealed by eye movements during interaction with familiar and n...

Sensory augmentation offers a novel opportunity to broaden our knowledge of human perception through the use of external sensors that record information that humans cannot perceive naturally. This information is then translated in a meaningful way to be presented through an inherent sensory modality. To assess whether such augmented senses affect t...

Access to complex graphical information is essential when connecting blind and visually impaired (BVI) people with the world. Tactile graphics readers enable access to graphical data through audio-tactile user interfaces (UIs), but these have yet to mature. A challenging task for blind people is locating specific elements–areas in detailed tactile...

Visual attention is mainly goal-directed and allocated based on the upcoming action to be performed. However, it is unclear how far this feature of gaze behavior generalizes in more naturalistic settings. The present study investigates active inference processes revealed by eye movements during interaction with familiar and novel tools with two lev...

Language interfaces with many other cognitive domains. This paper explores how interactions at these interfaces can be studied with deep learning methods, focusing on the relation between language emergence and visual perception. To model the emergence of language, a sender and a receiver agent are trained on a reference game. The agents are implem...

Tendencies of approach and avoidance seem to be a universal characteristic of humans. Specifically, individuals are faster in avoiding than in approaching negative stimuli and they are faster in approaching than in avoiding positive stimuli. The existence of this automatic approach-avoidance bias has been demonstrated in many studies. Furthermore,...

Neural mechanisms of face perception are predominantly studied in well‐controlled experimental settings that involve random stimulus sequences and fixed eye positions. While powerful, the employed paradigms are far from what constitutes natural vision. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of ecologically more valid experimental paradigms using natu...

Autonomous vehicles represent a significant development in our society, and their acceptance will largely depend on trust. This study investigates strategies to increase trust and acceptance by making the cars’ decisions. For this purpose, we created a virtual reality (VR) experiment with a self-explaining autonomous car, providing participants wit...

Multi-participant experiments in virtual reality (VR) could provide a new way to investigate real-time interactions in a controlled and ecologically valid environment. However, to create the impression of a shared world between participants, all non-static elements of the environment need to be networked. Currently available networking solutions co...

Vision provides the most important sensory information for spatial navigation. Recent technical advances allow new options to conduct more naturalistic experiments in virtual reality (VR) while additionally gathering data of the viewing behavior with eye tracking investigations. Here, we propose a method that allows one to quantify characteristics...

Single-brain neuroimaging studies have shown that human cooperation is associated with neural activity in frontal and temporoparietal regions. However, it remains unclear whether single-brain studies are informative about cooperation in real life, where people interact dynamically. Such dynamic interactions have become the focus of interbrain studi...

Language interfaces with many other cognitive domains. This paper explores how interactions at these interfaces can be studied with deep learning methods, focusing on the relation between language emergence and visual perception. To model the emergence of language, a sender and a receiver agent are trained on a reference game. The agents are implem...

While abundant in biology, foveated vision is nearly absent from computational models and especially deep learning architectures. Despite considerable hardware improvements, training deep neural networks still presents a challenge and constraints complexity of models. Here we propose an end-to-end neural model for foveal-peripheral vision, inspired...

Tendencies of approach and avoidance seem to be a universal characteristic of humans. Specifically, individuals are faster in avoiding than in approaching negative stimuli and they are faster in approaching than in avoiding positive stimuli. The existence of this automatic approach/avoidance bias has been demonstrated in many studies. Furthermore,...

Spatial orientation and navigation depend primarily on vision. Blind people lack this critical source of information. To facilitate wayfinding and to increase the feeling of safety for these people, the “feelSpace belt” was developed. The belt signals magnetic north as a fixed reference frame via vibrotactile stimulation. This study investigates th...

Augmented reality applications allow users to enrich their real surroundings with additional digital content. However, due to the limited field of view of augmented reality devices, it can sometimes be difficult to become aware of newly emerging information inside or outside the field of view. Typical visual conflicts like clutter and occlusion of...

Vision provides the most important sensory information for spatial navigation. Recent technical advances allow new options to conduct more naturalistic experiments in virtual reality (VR) while additionally gather data of the viewing behavior with eye tracking investigations. Here, we propose a method that allows to quantify characteristics of visu...

Eye-hand coordination is a research topic of great interest since it is significant to important activities related to object interactions. Various studies have been conducted ranging from simple object manipulation (Ballard et al., 1995) to more complex natural activities including driving (Mars and Navarro, 2012), hand washing (Pelz and Canosa, 2...

Social interactions, including joint actions, are a central aspects of human life (Frith, 2007; McCabe et al., 2001; De Jaegher et al., 2010). Joint action can be described as any social interaction whereby two or more people temporally and spatially align their actions (Sebanz et al., 2006). Due to their interactive nature, however, joint actio...

Eye-tracking experiments in virtual reality (VR) have become progressively popular in the last decade. These experiments measure human eye movement behavior in naturalistic settings that afford complex, natural head and body movements. Given the complexity, eye-tracking systems require high spatial accuracy and precision of the measured gaze in the...

People often perform visual tasks together, for example, when looking for a misplaced key. When performing such tasks jointly, people coordinate their actions to divide the labor, for example, by looking for the misplaced key in different rooms. This way, they tend to perform better together than individually-they attain a group benefit. A crucial...

Seminal studies on human cognitive behavior have been conducted in controlled laboratory settings, demonstrating that visual attention is mainly goal-directed and allocated based on the action performed. However, it is unclear how far these results generalize to cognition in more naturalistic settings. The present study investigates active inferenc...

Robots start to play a role in our social landscape, and they are progressively becoming responsive, both physically and socially. It begs the question of how humans react to and interact with robots in a coordinated manner and what the neural underpinnings of such behavior are. This exploratory study aims to understand the differences in human-hum...

Autonomous vehicles as cognitive agents will be an important use case of artificial intelligence in modern societies. Investigating how to increase acceptance and trust, we created a self-explaining car, informing passengers before actions in virtual reality. This study investigates the attitude towards self-driving cars with data from 7850 partici...

Neural mechanisms of face perception are predominantly studied in well-controlled experimental settings that involve random stimulus sequences and fixed eye positions. While powerful, the employed paradigms are far from what constitutes natural vision. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of ecologically more valid experimental paradigms using natu...

Single-brain neuroimaging studies have shown that human cooperation is associated with neural activity in frontal and temporoparietal regions. However, it remains unclear whether single-brain studies are informative about cooperation in real life, where people interact dynamically. Such dynamic interactions have become the focus of inter-brain stud...

Transcranial alternating current stimulation (tACS), applied to two brain sites with different phase lags, has been shown to modulate stimulation-outlasting functional EEG connectivity between the targeted regions. Given the lack of knowledge on mechanisms of tACS aftereffects, it is difficult to further enhance effect sizes and reduce variability...

There is growing awareness across the neuroscience community that the replicability of findings on the relationship between brain activity and cognitive phenomena can be improved by conducting studies with high statistical power that adhere to well-defined and standardized analysis pipelines. Inspired by efforts from the psychological sciences, and...

The reproduction and simulation of workplaces, and the analysis of body postures during work processes, are parts of ergonomic risk assessments. A commercial virtual reality (VR) system offers the possibility to model complex work scenarios as virtual mock-ups and to evaluate their ergonomic designs by analyzing motion behavior while performing wor...

Robots start to play a role in our social landscape, and they are progressively becoming responsive, both physically and socially. It begs the question of how humans react to and interact with robots in a coordinated manner and what the neural underpinnings of such behavior are. This exploratory study aims to understand the differences in human-hum...

The embodied approach of human cognition suggests that concepts are deeply dependent upon and constrained by an agent's physical body's characteristics, such as performed body movements. In this study, we attempted to broaden previous research on emotional priming, investigating the interaction of emotions and visual exploration. We used the joysti...

With the further development of highly automated vehicles, drivers will engage in non-related tasks while being driven. Still, drivers have to take over control when requested by the car. Here, the question arises, how potentially distracted drivers get back into the control-loop quickly and safely when the car requests a takeover. To investigate e...

Investigating spatial knowledge acquisition in virtual environments allows studying different sources of information under controlled conditions. Therefore, we built a virtual environment in the style of a European village and investigated spatial knowledge acquisition by experience in the immersive virtual environment and compared it to using an i...

Most artificial neural networks used for object detection and recognition are trained in a fully supervised setup. This is not only very resource consuming as it requires large data sets of labeled examples but also very different from how humans learn. We introduce a setup in which an artificial agent first learns in a simulated world through self...

One of the great challenges in word learning is that words are typically uttered in a context with many potential referents. Children's tendency to associate novel words with novel referents, which is taken to reflect a mutual exclusivity (ME) bias, forms a useful disambiguation mechanism. We study semantic learning in pragmatic agents—combining th...

With the further development of highly automated vehicles, drivers will engage in non-related tasks while being driven. Still, drivers have to take over control when requested by the car. Here the question arises, how potentially distracted drivers get back into the control-loop quickly and safely when the car requests a takeover. To investigate ef...