Dr Nina Hanning, neurocognition researcher at the Department of Psychology at Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin (HU) and the Cluster of Excellence "Science of Intelligence" Berlin, has been awarded a Starting Grant by the European Research Council (ERC) for her research project "Free-View - Neuro-cognitive processes underlying gaze control and perception across free-viewing eye movements". Together with her research group, she will investigate how we perceive our surroundings through eye movements. To do so, she will combine high-precision methods from classical vision research with new, flexible computer-aided approaches.
The mechanisms behind our clear gaze
Our gaze never really rests. Our eyes are constantly moving - more often than our heart beats - to explore our surroundings and gather information. Between brief moments of fixation, they make jerky movements, known as saccades, which drastically change the visual input. Each saccade shifts the entire scene on our retina at high speed. Nevertheless, we perceive the world around us as stable and coherent. How does this work?
Investigating the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms is complex because it requires millisecond-precise measurement that must be adapted to the respective eye movement. Previous studies on this topic have therefore focussed on isolated eye movements in which the subject looks from a predetermined location to a marked target in response to a signal. Although this traditional approach enables very precise measurements, the experimental setup is hardly comparable with our dynamic, natural gaze behaviour. In everyday life, we freely choose our gaze rhythm and the targets of our eye movements based on features of the environment and our internal goals.
The Free-View project
"To really understand how we perceive the world around us through eye movements, we need to study them under realistic conditions, i.e. without the direction of gaze being predetermined by the experimental setup," explains Hanning. "The challenge is to enable the test subjects to direct their gaze freely while still focussing the measurement on the right time and place." To do this, an algorithm has to predict where and when the eye will move next several times per second.
Nina Hanning's team combines precise techniques from traditional vision research with more flexible methods from scene perception research, which investigates how people explore visual scenes. By integrating state-of-the-art psychophysical, computational and neuroscientific methods, the aim is to predict freely chosen eye movements in real time and, for the first time, to investigate the subtle neurocognitive processes that enable natural perception.
The Free-View project is developing a new approach to understanding active perception and gaze control and investigating the extent to which results from previous studies under more artificial conditions can be transferred to natural vision. This methodology is also a promising tool to study eye movements in populations for whom traditionally strict experimental instructions are challenging, such as children, the elderly, or various patient groups.
About the person
Dr Nina Hanning holds a PhD in Neurocognitive Psychology from the Graduate School of Systemic Neurosciences at the Ludwig-Maximilians-University Munich. As a postdoctoral researcher, she conducted research at New York University and Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin with a fellowship from the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation and a grant from the European Commission.
European Research Council (ERC)
The European Research Council (ERC) funds ground-breaking project ideas from outstanding scientists in all fields of research. The decisive evaluation criterion is the scientific excellence of the submitted research project and the applicant. The ERC provides funding in various funding lines for the appropriate career stage. In the ERC Starting Grant, researchers are funded with up to 1.5 million euros over a maximum of five years in a time window of two to seven years after their doctorate.
Contact
Dr Nina M. Hanning
Department of Psychology, Humboldt-Universit?t zu Berlin
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