Modelling of Cognitive Processes

© TU Berlin/MKP

Our group's main goal is to try and understand perception. We investigate spatial vision as well as audition from the level of simple artificial stimuli up to object and scene perception. We strongly believe that progress towards a better understanding necessitates the combination of psychophysical experiments and computational modelling. In this spirit, we investigate early spatial vision, auditory tone-in-noise detection and natural scene perception. Further, we attempt to uncover the critical features observers use in complex perceptual tasks in order to adress fundamental problems of "similarity" and human categorization behavior. [Deutsch]


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News

June 2011

Valentin Haenel published the book: Git - Verteilte Versionsverwaltung für Code und Dokumente (In German).

May 2011

The paper Inference for psychometric functions in the presence of nonstationary behavior by Fründ, Haenel and Wichmann is published in the Journal of Vision.

April 2011

Felix Wichmann took up a professorship in Neuronale Informationsverarbeitung at the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Fakultät für Mathematik und Naturwissenschaften, Wilhelm-Schickard Institut für Informatik on April 1st 2011. The MKP group does not cease to exist, however, as Marianne Maertens is acting as interim head of the group until a successor is appointed to the MKP chair.

January 2011

Marianne Maertens is granted an Emmy-Noether Programme of the German Research Foundation for the following three to five years, beginning on April, 1, 2011.

October 2010

Marianne Maertens has won the Young Investigator Award (Nachwuchspreis) "Berlin Science Award of the Governing Mayor" ("Berliner Wissenschaftspreis des Regierenden Buergermeisters", or visit TU Berlin)

Vinzenz Schönfelder was accepted for a talk at KogWis 2010, the 10th Biannual Meeting of the German Society for Cognitive Science at Potsdam University, October 3-6 2010. The contribution is entitled: "Machine Learning in Auditory Psychophysics: System Identification with Sparse Pattern Classifiers".

Valentin Haenel and Tiziano Zito are teaching at the Advanced Scientific Programming in Python school in Trento, Italy.

August 2010

Ingo Fründ is giving a talk about "Estimating Psychometric Functions in Nonstationary Observers" at the meeting of the European Mathematical Psychology Group 2010 in Jyväskylä, Finnland.

July 2010

Tiziano Zito organizes the MDP sprint which is taking place in the MKP library.

June 2010

Hannah Dold attended the Cold Spring Harbor Course "Computational Neuroscience: Vision".

May 2010

Felix Wichmann is one of the invited speakers at the Cognitive Science and Machine Learning Summer School in Pula, Sardinia, from May the 6th till the 12th. This event is co-organized by Pascal2, University College London, Cambridge University, UC Berkeley, Manchester University, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, and MIT.

Hannah Dold, Ingo Fründ and Marianne Maertens will all present their work as posters at the Vision Sciences Society Annual Meeting in Naples, Flordia, from May 7th till 12th.

April 2010

Our paper Wichmann, Drewes, Rosas & Gegenfurtner "Animal Detection in Natural Scenes: Critical Features Revisited" appeared in the Journal of Vision, see our Publications page.

Former doctoral student and post-doc Frank Jäkel, now a post-doc with Josh Tenenbaum at MIT, received a "Ruf" to a Junior Professorship at the University of Osnabrück, his Alma Mater. Congratulations!

March 2010

Simon Barthelmé will join the MKP as a post-doc from May 2010. Simon did his PhD with Pascal Mamassian at the Université Rene Descartes in Paris and will work on developing statistical techniques to infer decision-relevant features from psychophysical data.

Pedro Rosas, honorary member of the MKP, was appointed to a professorship at the Universidad de Chile at Santiago. Congratulations!

January 2010

We are happy to welcome Virginia Richards, one of the most prominent researchers in auditory psychophysics, currently at the University of California in Irvine. She will visit the lab for a week in order to support us in our own auditory research and get to know the modern statistical analysis approaches that we employ.

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