Please join Bilkent University’s Psychology Department on Friday for the visit of Prof. Katja Dörschner-Boyaci.
Speaker: Katja Dörschner-Boyaci. Justus-Liebig-Universität Giessen
“Actively exploring materials and objects”
Date: Friday, 14 April 2023
Time: 12:30
Room: C Blok amphitheatre
Abstract:
Material qualities of objects play an important role in everyday decisions. How the brain learns and represents material categories is an active area of research. In this presentation I will highlight the role that interactions might play in forming these representations and talk about how exploratory hand and finger movements can yield specific haptic and visual information about the material and shape of an object, and how such interactions can lead to specific visual expectations about an object’s typical material qualities.
About the speaker:
Katja Doerschner earned her PhD, 2006 in Experimental Psychology at New York University working with Larry Maloney on color and gloss perception in 3D scenes. After a short postdoc period in Dan Kersten’s lab at the University of Minneapolis (Department of Psychology), she joined Bilkent University in 2008 as Assistant Professor.. Here, she continued her research on the visual perception of material properties until 2014. Following a brief research visit at the University of California San Diego, she joined the Justus-Liebig University (Department of Psychology) to conduct a 5-year research project that was funded by the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation. In 2019, she was appointed full professor by the JLU, where she has been since. Katja’s research focuses on understanding the computational and neural mechanisms that enable humans to perceive intrinsic object qualities like softness, stickiness or roughness, specifically, what visual information plays a role in this perceptual process and how associations between informative features form within and across modalities as a result of explorative behavior. In her work, she combines psychophysics with tracking methods, computational approaches, virtual reality, and fMRI.