Structure of the RTG

Our perception of the world builds on seemingly absolute and temporally stable parameters like the position, colour, and shape of a visual landmark, or the loudness and location of a sound source. The brain areas that process such sensory information are, however, highly plastic on many time scales and receive sensory inputs that only incompletely convey the physical reality.

Understanding the link between variable neuronal response patterns, variable percepts, and a stable mental representation of our world is a formidable challenge. Since this challenge covers aspects from neuronal coding to behaviour, it requires a tight interaction between multiple disciplines, ranging from neurophysiology to experimental psychology and computational neuroscience.

Fields of Expertise: selected experimental expertise and approaches

The goal of all projects is to gain a theoretical understanding of the functional consequences of the contextual changes. As context, we thereby consider any perceptual dimension that modulates a salient percept. A perceptual dimension can thus appear both as a context and as percept.

To ensure the interdisciplinary nature of the RTG, all PhD projects are organised as Tandem Projects, i.e., a doctoral candidate will have at least two supervisors and thereby have access to the complementary experiences of two (or more) respective labs. top