Loes van Dam
Main Focus
News
I'm currently employed by the .
Research Interest
Human perception is largely based on prior knowledge about correlations between the world around us and the sensory inputs resulting from it. Most of this prior knowledge has been learned and updated since our infancy, but even in our adulthood our perceptual system is continuously updating our knowledge as we encounter new correlations. My research interests concerns such learning processes and I'm trying to find out more about the mechanisms involved. To do so I study learning effects on several different timescales: from recalibration effects that take place within a few minutes to learning to use entirely new correlations that can take upto hours and even days to learn.
Curriculum Vitae
Experience
01/01/2011 - current, Postdoctoral Scientist, University of Bielefeld
01/01/2007 - 31/12/2010 Postdoctoral scientist, Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics
01/07/2006 - 31/12/2006 Postdoctoral scientist, Physics of Man, Helmholtz Institute at the University of Utrecht
01/02/2002 - 14/06/2006 PhD Student, Physics of Man, Helmholtz Institute at the University of Utrecht
01/09/1995 28/01/2002 Physics student at the University of Utrecht
Courses taught
03/2010 Blockpraktikum (2-week behavioral laboratory course), MPI Tübingen
17/10/2009 Open Day talk on visual illusions
2008/2009 Girls Day workshop on visual illusions
Other teaching experience
1998 - 2005 Teaching assistant at the Physics Department of the University of Utrecht. Assisted courses include: several (practical) physics and computer application courses, mechanics and optics.
Mentoring
11/2010 - 12/2010 Maurice Coenjaerts, (MPI Tübingen), Freshman internship, Basic procedures in psychophysics
02/2010 - 04/2010 Anna-Antonia Pape, (MPI Tübingen), Internship, Knowing the random errors when pointing
02/2009 - 09/2009 Devika Narain, (LMU, Munich), Master dissertation, Learning statistics for visuomotor tracking
08/2008 - 09/2008 Devika Narain, (LMU, Munich), Internship, Learning statistics for visuomotor pointing
09/2007 - 12/2007 David Hawellek, (MPI Tübingen), Internship, Learning visuomotor mappings
10/2006 - 12/2006 René Mulder, (Utrecht University), Master project, Sequential dependency in binocular rivalry