200097 SE Anwendungsseminar: Geist und Gehirn (2018S)

“It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
Romantic nonsense, of course. A short look into any source with more scientific credibility than Antoine de Saint-Exupéry reveals that we “see” neither with our eyes nor hearts, but with our brains. Yet our brain has to be very efficient in the way it processes information, necessitating it to be highly selective. But what mechanisms and principles drive this selectivity?
A trivial or very theoretic question? Think again! Vision is our primary sense. Much of our inner representation of the outside world is constructed by visual information. So, in the end, our selective visual attention builds our subjective reality. The effects on our behaviour are as numerous as they are far-reaching. The topics in this course cover a large variety of research fields, such as:
- Attention in the new media (films, videos games)
- (Un)conscious manipulation of attention and behaviour
- Cognition and language
- Attentional biases in psychological disorders

The question of how visual attention is guided/captured builds the framework for this course. The main goal to prepare students for their Master thesis and to tailor the course topics to the students’ specific needs. For example, the course can focus on deepening basic scientific skills acquired during the Bachelor studies. Otherwise, the course can focus on practical exercises in designing an experiment and statistical analysis.
Depending on the total number of students in the course, we will work through individual questions and engage in multiple practical tasks and discussions.
Please note that this course will be held about bi-weekly in four hour sessions.