news
7/2021
Ben is very grateful to Sharon Gilaie-Dotan for inviting him to be a speaker on the Bar Ilan Vision Science Seminar - alongside some of his scientific heroes! The talk and discussion were much fun and you can check them out on YouTube.
6/2021
Ben, Max and Marcel (including his brain!) were visited by Science Reporter Maurice Kontz, who interviewed Ben for Hessen schafft Wissen.de. You can follow their conversation on individual perception, eyemovements and brain imaging on YouTube (German).
DFG funds project on contact tracing
4/2021
One of the main strategies in the fight against CoViD-19 is Test and Trace. Data scientists have highlighted a main challenge to this approach: Classic contact tracing may be too slow to keep up with the infection dynamics of CoViD-19. However, there is an additional challenge, which is less well understood. For accurate reporting, interviewees have to remember all their contacts, sometimes going as far back as two weeks. What is the memory bottleneck for contact tracing? Ben and Max have developed a study idea to find out, which just received funding from the DFG.
2/2021
ABC journalist Natasha Mitchell interviewed Ben, Susanne Stoll and Alan Love on the role of failures in Science for her Science Friction podcast.
Ben gave a talk at the University of London
02/2021
Bahador Bahrami kindly invited Ben to present our work on What are you looking at? at the Institute of Philosophy, which is part of the University of London's School of Advanced Study.
1/2021
Diana (Weissleder, can't have enough Dianas!) wrote a very cogent explanation of her BSc thesis for Bahador Bahrami's blog. Diana worked with Max and Ben to test whether friends show more similar gaze behavior than strangers. Check out her blog post!
1/2021
Susanne Stoll tried to replicate methods from one of Ben's PhD papers and discovered a potential flaw in the analysis. Ben went back to the old data, confirmed the problem and retracted his original publication (retraction notice). He and some of his colleagues joined Susanne in an effort to explain the (surprisingly complicated) problem in a technical paper (preprint), so that others won't have to repeat his mistake. Sam Schwarzkopf wrote a blog post about the ordeal, Retraction Watch featured it as 'doing the right thing' and Ben shared his thoughts on curiosity and correcting our errors in an invited commentary in Nature.
Max gave a talk at Fribourg
1/2021
Max presented his work on Intra- and interindividual differences in person perception at the AFC Lab Talk Series hosted by Meike Ramon (University of Fribourg).
Ben gave a talk at Stanford
12/2020
Ben presented our work on 'Where' in the ventral stream at the Stanford Vision Brunch.
Marcel gave a talk at Fribourg
11/2020
Marcel presented his work on Evidence for atypical semantic visual salience in Super Recognizers at AFC Lab Talk Series hosted by Meike Ramon (Univeristy of Fribourg)
Ben gave a talk at Berkeley
11/2020
The gods of Zoom provide us with the opportunity to present our work afar, despite the distance and the virus. Ben kicked off with a talk on 'Where' in the ventral stream at the Neuroimaging Seminar Series hosted by Sonia Bishop's lab at UC Berkeley.
09/2020
Marcel used the OSIE dataset to develop a short test of gaze behaviour and found that some dimensions of individual gaze biases can be estimated from less than 5 minutes worth of eyetracking data. This will help us and other researchers to probe individual gaze in a much more time-efficient manner, which is especially important for research involving children and other vulnerable individuals. Marcel published this as his very first paper, which just appeared in Journal of Vision. Congrats, Marcel! Also, special thanks to Dr. Stefanie Mueller and the ZPID PsychLab offline for collecting the validation data. The paper, code and data are all open access, so go ahead and use it =)
We're online!
03/2020
the group homepage is live - welcome to individual-perception.com =)
JLU Award for Ben
11/2019
Ben received the Justus Liebig University Giessen Award for his research on individual perception.
INDIVISUAL funded by the ERC!
9/2019
Ben received a 1.5M€ starting grant from the European Research Council to start a lab on individual perception at JLU (press release and newspaper article in german). Hooray!
6/2019
Our paper on individual differences in gaze behaviour was covered by inside science and MDR (german public radio). Also see our press release here (german).