Prof. Dr. Heinrich Bülthoff

The superior performance of natural over artificial intelligence rests on the ability of the human brain to integrate and process complex sensory information for useful actions. Future advances in our understanding of the human brain will need integrating approaches across disciplines, including psychology, computer science, robotics, and neuroimaging.

The department is concerned with the fundamental processes of human perception. The primary focus is how the information from different sense organs is integrated to create a consistent representation of the “world in our heads”. Traditional psychophysical methods emphasize the analysis of perception using simple stimuli; however, computer vision studies have made it clear that further advances in our understanding of perception and cognition will rely on the use of realistic stimuli and tasks. In the Cyberneum we use methods developed from computer graphics and virtual reality to build simulated naturalistic environments under precise experimental control in order to investigate cognition in a closed perception-action loop. In psychophysical studies we could show that humans can integrate multimodal sensory information in a statistically optimal way, in which cues are weighted according to their reliability.

The research focuses on the integration of information from the visual, haptic and balance senses and on the development of efficient algorithms for building assistant systems to help the aging society to cope with the challenges of the decline with age in perceptual and cognitive capabilities.

Many of our results from basic research in perception and cognition are further developed into useful application.

Our group led or participated in several of the European Research projects: myCopter, SUPRA, TANGO, VR-Hyperspace.