Topic: virtual reality

A 23-month postdoctoral appointment at 0.8 FTE in Pieter Medendorp’s sensorimotor research group at the Donders Institute. The project investigates perception, movement and decisions under uncertainty through behavioural experiments and computational models. Work combines multisensory integration, Bayesian modelling and optimal control with virtual reality, wearable sensors and motion platforms, including natural navigation, orienting and reaching. The preferred start is 1 December 2026. Responsibilities may include student supervision and teaching.

Postdoctoral research with Christian Doeller at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany. The group studies structured representations supporting navigation, episodic and working memory, learning and decision-making. Projects connect hippocampal population coding with knowledge representations and possible translation to Alzheimer’s disease. Approaches include high-field fMRI, MEG, EEG, virtual reality, psychophysics and computational models, including machine learning and deep neural networks. The project can be shaped around interdisciplinary intere

The Schulze Lab at HHMI Janelia seeks a postdoctoral scientist spanning systems neuroscience, computer vision, pose tracking, behavioral machine learning, and virtual reality. The researcher will build closed-loop paradigms and brain-behavior maps to study collective behavior, social cognition, individuality, sex differences, and stress in Danionella fish.

How central were psychological features deriving from our visual systems to the early evolution of human visual culture? Art making emerged deep in our evolutionary history, with the earliest art appearing over 100,000 years ago as geometric patterns etched on fragments of ochre and shell, and figurative representations of prey animals flourishing in the Upper Palaeolithic (c. 40,000 – 15,000 years ago). The latter reflects a complex visual process; the ability to represent something that exists in the real world as a flat, two-dimensional image. In this presentation, I argue that pareidolia –

Running, swimming, or flying through the world, animals are constantly making decisions while on the move—decisions that allow them to choose where to eat, where to hide, and with whom to associate. Despite this most studies have considered only on the outcome of, and time taken to make, decisions. Motion is, however, crucial in terms of how space is represented by organisms during spatial decision-making. Employing a range of new technologies, including automated tracking, computational reconstruction of sensory information, and immersive ‘holographic’ virtual reality (VR) for animals, experi

Neurons in the rodent hippocampus appear to encode the position of the animal in physical space during movement. Individual ``place cells'' fire in restricted sub-regions of an environment, a feature often taken as evidence that the hippocampus encodes a map of space that subserves navigation. But these same neurons exhibit complex responses to many other variables that defy explanation by position alone, and the hippocampus is known to be more broadly critical for memory formation. Here we elaborate and test a theory of hippocampal coding which produces place cells as a general consequence of

Understanding how internally driven cognitive processes (COPs) give rise to behavior in different species is one of the key challenges in systems neuroscience. Traditionally, neuroscience has aimed to isolate individual COPs by simplifying sensory stimuli and behavioral readouts. Yet in natural behavior, several COPs can co-occur, often with overlapping neural representations. The dynamics of such superimposed COPs are yet to be understood, as well as the extent to which they generalize across species. To tackle this question, we developed a naturalistic Virtual Reality setup in which two spec

During navigation, animals estimate their position using path integration and landmarks. In a series of two studies, we used virtual reality and electrophysiology to dissect how these inputs combine to generate the brain’s spatial representations. In the first study (Campbell et al., 2018), we focused on the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) and its set of navigationally-relevant cell types, including grid cells, border cells, and speed cells. We discovered that attractor dynamics could explain an array of initially puzzling MEC responses to virtual reality manipulations. This theoretical framewo

Results: the main areas which were modified based on participatory feedback were the variety of immersive scenarios to cover a range of ages and interests, the number of levels of complexity to ensure small improvements were measured, the feedback and reward schemes to ensure positive reinforcement, and specific provision for participants with balance issues, who had difficulties when using head-mounted displays. The effectiveness of the finalised BEARS suite will be evaluated in a large-scale clinical trial. We have added in additional login options for other members of the family and based o

According to a classical control-theoretic perspective on self-movement, our brains pilot our bodies to achieve goals, sometimes using open-loop predictive models and sometimes with closed-loop feedback. From this perspective, synchronization of self-motion with a moving target is a simple control problem, where error between body and target is minimized by some combination of responsive and predictive control. However, self-movement can also result from reconciliation of multisensory prediction errors. When subjected to a visual/proprioceptive conflict, our bodies respond spontaneously and un

Playing action video games involves both explicit (conscious) and implicit (non-conscious) expectations of timed events, such as the appearance of foes. While studies revealed that explicit attention skills are improved in action video game players (VGPs), their implicit skills remained untested. To this end, we investigated explicit and implicit temporal processing in VGPs and non-VGPs (control participants). In our variable foreperiod task, participants were immersed in a virtual reality and instructed to respond to a visual target appearing at variable delays after a cue. I will present beh

Gravity is a constant in our lives. It provides an internalized reference to which all other perceptions are related. We can experimentally manipulate the relationship between physical gravity with other cues to the direction of “up” using virtual reality - with either HMDs or specially built tilting environments - to explore how gravity contributes to perceptual judgements. The effect of gravity can also be cancelled by running experiments on the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. Changing orientation relative to gravity - or even just perceived orientation – affects your percept

Environmental boundaries anchor cognitive maps that support memory. However, trapezoidal boundary geometry distorts the regular firing patterns of entorhinal grid cells proposedly providing a metric for cognitive maps. Here, we test the impact of trapezoidal boundary geometry on human spatial memory using immersive virtual reality. Consistent with reduced regularity of grid patterns in rodents and a grid-cell model based on the eigenvectors of the successor representation, human positional memory was degraded in a trapezoid compared to a square environment; an effect particularly pronounced in

How the brain represents the body is a fundamental question in cognitive neuroscience. Experimental studies are difficult because ‘the body is always there’ (William James). In recent years immersive virtual reality techniques have been introduced that deliver apparent changes to the body extending earlier techniques such as the rubber hand illusion, or substituting the whole body by a virtual one visually collocated with the real body, and seen from a normal first person perspective. This talk will introduce these techniques, and concentrate on how changing the body can change the mind and be

Natural perception relies inherently on inferring causal structure in the environment. However, the neural mechanisms and functional circuits that are essential for representing and updating the hidden causal structure during multisensory processing are unknown. To address this, monkeys were trained to infer the probability of a potential common source from visual and proprioceptive signals on the basis of their spatial disparity in a virtual reality system. The proprioceptive drift reported by monkeys demonstrated that they combined historical information and current multisensory signals to e

Hippocampal pyramidal cells have been widely studied during locomotion, when theta oscillations are present, and during short wave ripples at rest, when replay takes place. However, we find a subset of pyramidal cells that are preferably active during rest, in the absence of theta oscillations and short wave ripples. We recorded these cells using two-photon imaging in dorsal CA1 of the hippocampus of mice, during a virtual reality object location recognition task. During locomotion, the cells show a similar level of activity as control cells, but their activity increases during rest, when this

The hippocampus is crucial for spatial navigation and episodic memory formation. Hippocampal place cells exhibit spatially selective activity within an environment and have been proposed to form the neural basis of a cognitive map of space that supports these mnemonic functions. However, the direct influence of place cell activity on spatial navigation behaviour has not yet been demonstrated. Using an ‘all-optical’ combination of simultaneous two-photon calcium imaging and two-photon holographically targeted optogenetics, we identified and selectively activated place cells that encoded behavio

Choosing among spatially distributed options is a central challenge for animals, from deciding among alternative potential food sources or refuges, to choosing with whom to associate. Here, using an integrated theoretical and experimental approach (employing immersive Virtual Reality), with both invertebrate and vertebrate models—the fruit fly, desert locust and zebrafish—we consider the recursive interplay between movement and collective vectorial integration in the brain during decision-making regarding options (potential ‘targets’) in space. We reveal that the brain repeatedly breaks multi-

In this talk, Dr. Quandt will share results from behavioral and cognitive neuroscience studies from the past few years of her work in the Action & Brain Lab, an EEG lab at Gallaudet University, the world's premiere university for deaf and hard-of-hearing students. These results will center upon the question of how extensive knowledge of signed language changes, and in some cases enhances, people's perception and cognition. Evidence for this effect comes from studies of human biological motion using point light displays, self-report, and studies of action perception. Dr. Quandt will also discus

Tracking heading within an environment is a fundamental requirement for flexible, goal-directed navigation. In insects, a head-direction representation that guides the animal’s movements is maintained in a conserved brain region called the central complex. Two-photon calcium imaging of genetically targeted neural populations in the central complex of tethered fruit flies behaving in virtual reality (VR) environments has shown that the head-direction representation is updated based on self-motion cues and external sensory information, such as visual features and wind direction. Thus far, the he

At the foundation of human conscious experience lie basic embodied experiences of selfhood – experiences of simply ‘being alive’. In this talk, I will make the case that this central feature of human existence is underpinned by predictive regulation of the interior of the body, using the framework of predictive processing, or active inference. I start by showing how conscious experiences of the world around us can be understood in terms of perceptual predictions, drawing on examples from psychophysics and virtual reality. Then, turning the lens inwards, we will see how the experience of being

Gravity is a constant in our lives. It provides an internalized reference to which all other perceptions are related. We can experimentally manipulate the relationship between physical gravity with other cues to the direction of “up” using virtual reality - with either HMDs or specially built tilting environments - to explore how gravity contributes to perceptual judgements. The effect of gravity can also be cancelled by running experiments on the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. Changing orientation relative to gravity - or even just perceived orientation – affects your percept

Designing artificially intelligent systems and interfaces with socio-emotional skills is a challenging task. Progress in industry and developments in academia provide us a positive outlook, however, the artificial social and emotional intelligence of the current technology is still limited. My lab’s research has been pushing the state of the art in a wide spectrum of research topics in this area, including the design and creation of new datasets; novel feature representations and learning algorithms for sensing and understanding human nonverbal behaviours in solo, dyadic and group settings; de

My lab seeks to understand how the mammalian brain performs the computations that underlie cognitive functions, including decision-making, short-term memory, and spatial navigation, at the level of the building blocks of the nervous system, cell types and neural populations organized into circuits. We have developed methods to measure, manipulate, and analyze neural circuits across various spatial and temporal scales, including technology for virtual reality, optical imaging, optogenetics, intracellular electrophysiology, molecular sensors, and computational modeling. I will present recent wor