Perception

…robots, locomotion, manipulation, perception, human–robot interaction, learning and safety. Successful candidates receive fully funded doctoral employment at ETH salary rates with social benefits and define their research project with a supervisor. Start by agreement in 2027. Apply through the ETH online recruitment portal. Application deadline: 2026-11-27.

…robots, locomotion, manipulation, perception, human–robot interaction and computational design. The fellowship includes opportunities to develop learning methods on real hardware and mentor students.

Experimental psychology research on attention, perception, learning, memory, language and reasoning falls within the society’s Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology remit. Supports small empirical projects in experimental psychology, including research assistance, participant costs, specialist software, scanning fees, essential small equipment and consumables. The maximum is GBP 10,000 for a project normally completed within one year. Applications are due 1 December 2026, with earliest start 1 February. Funds are reimbursed to the host institution in arrears; overheads, student fees and

Experimental psychology research on attention, perception, learning, memory, language and reasoning falls within the society’s Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology remit. Travel and accommodation support for a visit to another institution to learn experimental methods or undertake studies unavailable at the home department. Up to GBP 3,500 is available to the visitor, with up to GBP 100 of additional actual host costs. Subsistence, conference fees and poster costs are excluded. The next submission date is 1 December 2026; visits should start at least three months after submission. Appl

The Cognitive Neuroscience (CogNeuro) program seeks to fund proposals that can advance our understanding of the neural mechanisms underlying human cognition and behavior. Funded proposals typically relate precise and rich quantifications of physiological responses and behavior in ways that advance theory (Intellectual Merit). Funded proposal also typically strengthen the field through, for example, outreach, mentoring the next generation of diverse cognitive neuroscientists, and/or increasing awareness and utilization of the research the field produces (Broader Impacts). Intellectual Merit In

…neural dynamics, and models of perception, cognition and action. The primarily single-track format combines keynotes, research talks and posters with some parallel community sessions. Generative Adversarial Collaborations examine competing theories; keynote-and-tutorial sessions connect

Investigate how eye movements shape perception with Martina Poletti and Michele Rucci at the University of Rochester. Research spans spatial representations, foveal and peripheral processing, attention, retinal anatomy, emmetropization and myopia. The laboratory combines human psychophysics, controlled retinal stimulation, computational modelling, precise eye and head tracking, retinal imaging and EEG during active vision. Researchers work within the Center for Visual Science and Brain and Cognitive Sciences, with collaborations in optics, neuroscience and ophthalmology. Applications comprise

Develop perception and learning methods for humanoid robots in autonomous manufacturing. The doctorate combines RGB-D data, scene understanding, synthetic data, simulation-to-reality transfer and robot manipulation, with experimental validation on physical platforms. The project is hosted by the Advanced Manufacturing Lab and includes collaboration with researchers and industrial partners. Apply through the ETH online recruitment portal. The vacancy is currently advertised with an active application route; no closing date is stated.

…change the mental models that shape perception. The call covers agency, interoception and emotion regulation, identity and self-narrative, and meaning or belonging. Projects should test mechanisms rather than only symptom relief. Up to USD 900,000 supports three years, including no more than 15% overhead. Submit an anonymised letter of intent by 5 October 2026 at 11:59 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Full proposals in February 2027 require invitation.

…meerkat groups, together with subtle perception and action in competitive games, provide concrete settings for examining those perspectives.

…how it relates to experiments on perception and cortical organisation, and the challenges of developing laws for subjective experience.

Accurate perception of the environment is a constructive process that requires integration of external bottom-up sensory signals with internally-generated top-down information reflecting past experiences and current aims. Decades of work have elucidated how sensory neocortex processes physical stimulus features. In contrast, examining how memory-related-top-down information is encoded and integrated with bottom-up signals has long been challenging. Here, I will discuss our recent work pinpointing the outermost layer 1 of neocortex as a central hotspot for processing of experience-dependent top

Perception balances what we sense with what we expect. To maintain accuracy, our brains must continuously update sensory expectations when predictions don't match reality. To investigate this, we trained mice on an auditory detection task with hidden switches in stimulus probability across trials. Mice dynamically adjusted their decision thresholds, tracking these changing sound probabilities. We monitored dopamine in the tail of the striatum (TS), a region at the interface of sensory processing and action selection that receives direct auditory cortex inputs. Given mesolimbic dopamine's estab

Deep learning provides new data-driven tools to relate neural activity to perception and cognition, aiding scientists in developing theories of neural computation that increasingly resemble biological systems both at the level of behavior and of neural activity. But what in a deep neural network should correspond to what in a biological system? This question is addressed implicitly in the use of comparison measures that relate specific neural or behavioral dimensions via a particular functional form. However, distinct comparison methodologies can give conflicting results in recovering even a k

William James’s use of “time in passing” and “stream of thoughts” may be two sides of the same coin that emerge from the brain segmenting the continuous flow of information into discrete events. Departing from that idea, we investigated how the content of a realistic scene impacts two distinct temporal experiences: the felt duration and the speed of the passage of time. I will present you the results from an online study in which we used a well-established experimental paradigm, the temporal bisection task, which we extended to passage of time judgments. 164 participants classified seconds-lon

Anil Seth discusses the scientific study of subjective experience and why perception can be described as controlled hallucination. He and Steven Strogatz consider the visual ambiguity of the dress, the relationship between brain activity and conscious experience, and public participation in mapping the diversity of human perception.

…to measure hallucinations-like perception in humans and mice alike. Using targeted neural circuit manipulations, we identified a causal role for striatal dopamine in mediating hallucination-like perception. Building on this, we currently investigate the neural and immunological upstream regulators of these dopaminergic circuits with the goal to identify new biological treatment targets for psychosis

Humans are very good at visually recognizing materials and inferring their properties. Without touching surfaces, we can usually tell what they would feel like, and we enjoy vivid visual intuitions about how they typically behave. This is impressive because the retinal image that the visual system receives as input is the result of complex interactions between many physical processes. Somehow the brain has to disentangle these different factors. I will present some recent work in which we show that an unsupervised neural network trained on images of surfaces spontaneously learns to disentangle

…to be the basic building blocks of perception and memory in the brain: representations of specific concepts. Activation of an assembly signals the presence of its associated concept to downstream targets. An efficient implementation should allow similar concepts to be represented by similar assemblies, sharing a subset of neurons. However, learning overlapping assemblies in computational models is difficult. Similar assemblies tend to either merge or diverge during the learning process. The same mechanism

…about the stability of memory and perception, but its driving forces and properties are still mostly unknown. We combine data analysis and modeling to show that implicit regularization can partially explain drift. We train an artificial neural network on a predictive coding task. We continue training in the presence of noise after go

The ‘quantification’ of perception is arguably both one of the most important and most difficult aspects of perception study. This is particularly true in visual perception, in which the evaluation of the perceptual threshold is a pillar of the experimental process. The choice of the correct adaptive psychometric procedure, as well as the selection of the proper parameters, is a difficult but key aspect of the experimental protocol. For instance, Bayesian methods such as QUEST, require the a priori choice of a family of functions (e.g. Gaussian), which is rarely known before the experiment, as

…for an open exploration of how “perception” can be understood as a phenomenon that does not only belong to humans, or even the so-called “higher organisms”, but exists across the entire spectrum of life in a myriad of forms. The symposium invites leading practitioners from the arts and sciences to present unique insights through short talks, open discussions, and artistic interventions that bring us slightly closer to the life worlds of plants and fungi, microbial communities and immune systems, cuttlefish and crows. What

Surround suppression is ubiquitous in visual processing and perception. Neurophysiology and modeling studies reveal a rich set of spatial context effects in the Primary Visual Cortex, whereby surrounding stimuli nonlinearly modulate (e.g., suppress) the responses of a center target stimulus. Studies suggest that the strength of surround suppression depends on the image statistics of the center and surround pattern. Namely, if the center and surround share similar statistics, the neural responses are more suppressed by the surround. This behavior has been connected to computational benefits suc

Perception is uncertain. Repeated presentations of the same stimulus elicit variable perceptual impressions. To robustly guide behavior, the neural circuits that mediate perception must therefore extract both feature estimates and feature uncertainty from sensory inputs. How they do so is not well understood. We addressed this question using an approach that combines three components. First, a rich stimulus set which varies in feature value and uncertainty. Second, observation of neural population activity in a sensory circuit that represents these features. And third, a maximum likelihood dec