Mini symposium: Stability and Change
PROGRAM
13.00 Karl Gegenfurtner: Stability and change in sensorimotor systems
One of the most critical challenges facing any organism is to maintain stability in the face of a dynamic and uncertain world. At the same time, successful behavior also rests crucially on our ability to adapt when circumstances fundamentally change. These two conflicting demands present a major dilemma: to determine when variability is noise that must be suppressed, and when it is a signal that requires adjusting our behavior to the ‘new normal’. I will present some examples how sensorimotor systems deal with this dilemma and try to derive some general questions and principles from them.
13.35 Martin Rolfs: Stability and change in active vision
More than 10,000 times every waking hour, we are using rapid eye movements (saccades) to change where we look, allowing us to see every aspect of the visual scene at the highest resolution. Psychophysical studies suggest that vision undergoes turbulent changes every time the eyes make these rapid movements: we mislocalize flashed stimuli in space and time, visual sensitivity is notably hampered across the visual field, and visual sensory memory is wiped out as the saccade imposes drastic displacements of the image on the retina. I will present research investigating how the active visual system bridges the abrupt discontinuities accompanying saccades to shape a seamless perceptual experience of the visual world.
14.10 Coffee Break
14.30 Rainer Goebel: Stability and change in brain and cognition (preliminary title)
15.05 Bernhard Hommel: Stability and change in human metacontrol
Humans often faces cognitive-control dilemmas that are binary in nature, with the choice between persistence/exploitation and flexibility/exploration being a crucial one. Tackling these dilemmas requires metacontrol, i.e., the control of the current cognitive-control policy. I will review evidence suggesting that metacontrol states are constrained by both the genetic setup and cultural factors, but can be modified by various means, including food, meditation, brain stimulation, and neurofeedback.
15.40 Closure
All are welcome!
