Abstract

More than 10,000 times every waking hour, we are using rapid eye movements (saccades) to change where we look, allowing us to see every aspect of the visual scene at the highest resolution. Psychophysical studies suggest that vision undergoes turbulent changes every time the eyes make these rapid movements: we mislocalize flashed stimuli in space and time, visual sensitivity is notably hampered across the visual field, and visual sensory memory is wiped out as the saccade imposes drastic displacements of the image on the retina.

Dr Rolfs will present research investigating how the active visual system bridges the abrupt discontinuities accompanying saccades to shape a seamless perceptual experience of the visual world. He will argue that attention and memory play key roles in this process and address the function of re-afferent signals, which have long been neglected as a source of visual stability in the face of eye movements.

Biography

Trained in Psychology, Martin Rolfs obtained his PhD from the University of Potsdam (Germany) in 2007. For his thesis on the control of micro-movements of the eyes, he received the Heinz Heckhausen Award of the German Psychological Society for an outstanding dissertation. In 2008, he joined Patrick Cavanagh's group at the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception in Paris, where he worked on the attentional basis of perceptual continuity across eye movements. 

In 2010, he was awarded a Marie Curie postdoctoral fellowship from the European Commission to join Marisa Carrasco's lab at New York University and, in the return phase, Eric Castet's lab in Marseille. They investigated relations between goal-directed hand and eye movements, visual performance and appearance. 

In October 2012, Rolfs received an Emmy Noether Fellowship from the German Research Foundation (DFG), allowing him to start an independent research group at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience Berlin. He was the spokesman of the team organizing ECVP 2017 - the 40th European Conference on Visual Perception - which attracted 1200 vision scientists from 40 countries to Berlin. 

In January 2018, Rolfs became a fellow of the DFG's Heisenberg programme and became a full professor at the Psychology Department of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. Embedded in international collaborations (with colleagues in New York, Michigan, Paris, Sydney, Marseille, etc.), his group assesses the architecture and plasticity of perceptual processes in active vision, using eye tracking, motion tracking, psychophysics, computational modelling, EEG and studies of clinical populations.  

Links:

www.rolfslab.de
www.martinrolfs.de
https://twitter.com/MartinRolfs