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Jan L. Souman, Dr.
Research Scientist (Postdoctoral Fellow) |
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MPI for Biological Cybernetics
Dept. Bülthoff, NWG Ernst
Spemannstraße 41
72076 Tübingen
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+49-7071-601643 |
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02.B.2 |
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jan.souman@tuebingen.mpg.de |
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My research interests center on visual perception during various forms of self-motion. The lead question is how our brain combines information from different sources to construct a usable representation to act upon.
I did my PhD (Utrecht University, supervisors Lex Wertheim and Ignace Hooge) on visual motion perception during smooth pursuit eye movements. Since the start of my post-doc at the MPI (in the group of Marc Ernst), I have extended this research to visual speed perception during walking. The goal is to build a quantitative model of how sensory information about the walking movements is combined with visual input to produce a visual speed percept. The effect of walking on visual motion perception is not straightforward, depending largely on the visual speed presented. In collaboration with Tom Freeman (Cardiff), I’m also still working on pursuit eye movements.
Recently, I’ve become interested in basic spatial navigation tasks. I conducted a field experiment in the Sahara desert (together with the WDR program Kopfball) to test whether people are able to maintain a fixed course when walking through unfamiliar environments. According to common belief, people are not able to do so, but end up walking in circles. We have also tested people in a large forest and, blindfolded, on an airstrip. We have found that people really walk in circles, if there are no reliable cues for direction available. With for instance the sun visible, people can walk in a fairly straight line.
I am also doing more applied work, trying to improve locomotion simulation in Virtual Reality. In the European CyberWalk project, we have developed an omnidirectional treadmill, which allows for unrestricted natural walking through arbitrarily large environments. This can now be used as a research tool, e.g. to study spatial navigation in large scale environments.
Originally, I was trained as a theologian (Kampen Theological University) and then studied psychology. In my research, I tend to take a quantitative approach, in which empirical research is guided by formal models.
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