Studying everyday cognitive experience: Neuroscientific methods in naturalistic settings

This workshop explores neuroscientific methods for studying cognition in everyday life, emphasising how brain activity, perception, and behavior interact in naturalistic settings. By embracing embodied cognition, we highlight how cutting-edge technology (including EEG, VR, and eye tracking) enables a deeper understanding of cognitive processes as they unfold in real-world scenarios.

The workshop will consist of a keynote by Prof. Peter König (University of Osnabrück, Germany), followed by 4 short talks and a general discussion. 

Keynote by Peter König

Investigating embodied cognition by combining EEG-VR-Eye tracking in cognitive neuroscience

Embodied cognition proposes that the understanding of cognitive processes must be firmly rooted in our interaction with the environment. Here, we test such theories by recording neurophysiological signals (EEG, MEG) and eye tracking in naturalistic environments using VR techniques. Our results show that aligning trials to saccade-onset leads to more well-defined ERPs, especially for the P100 component, and support that saccade-onset ERPs are the better-suited analysis method than fixation-onset ERPs for this type of experiment. Further, we observe an evolution of condition-based differences, i.e., face vs. background fixations, compatible with previous reports but extending in a large temporal window and including all electrode sites at different points in time. Further, we apply this set of techniques in the wild, i.e., real world conditions and report interims results. Finally, in the context of a task, our data revealed that gaze fixations were allocated to action-relevant targets just in time and that variability of behavior is surprisingly low-dimensional and further reduced at critical events, indicating distinct mechanisms for coordination in the brain. In summary, embracing the concepts of 4E-cognition leads to experimental paradigms delivering quantitatively and qualitatively new results, emphasizing the close bi-directional relation of cognition and action.

A link to Prof. Peter König's biography (in German).

Short talks

1. Diederick C Niehorster (Humanities Lab). Tools for studying the activities of daily life using eye tracking.
2. Vasiliki Kondyli (Department of Psychology). Exploring embodied visuo-locomotive experience in real-world and VR settings.
3. Andrey Nikolaev (Department of Psychology). Neural mechanisms of refixations learned from EEG time-locked to saccade or fixation onset.
4. Andrija Daković (mBrainTrain). Blink, Think, Sync: mBrainTrain portable EEG multimodal demo.

Last day for registration has passed.

Organisers

Andrey R. Nikolaev, Researcher at the Department of Psychology
Vasiliki Kondyli, Postdoctoral fellow at the Department of Psychology

Practicalities

Coffee (fika) will be served.

Welcome to register!

Andrey R. Nikolaev & Vasiliki Kondyli

Arranged by: Lund Social Science Methods Centre