Perception and Action

Perception and Action

Duration 03/2026 - 02/2027

Mind wandering—shifts of attention toward task-unrelated thoughts—is common during educational activities and reliably predicts poorer learning outcomes. However, measures of mind wandering were developed for simple attention tasks and do not capture the complexity of learners’ cognitive processes. In learning contexts, students also engage in productive thoughts such as elaboration, integration, and metacognitive monitoring. Existing measurement instruments often misclassify learning-relevant thoughts as mind wandering or as forms of interference, limiting interpretability and constraining the questions researchers can address.

Perception and Action

Duration 09/2025 - 08/2027

People often interact with AI language models to form an opinion on a particular issue. Depending on their prior knowledge and personality, they express varying degrees of confidence in their own knowledge through language. This project examines how language models handle queries with different levels of confidence: Do they adapt their language to match the expressed confidence, or do they predominantly answer queries in a confident and persuasive tone?

Perception and Action

Duration 04/2025 - 03/2028

This dissertation-project examines how climate-change-denial can be effectively countered in video content. The focus is on the question of how proactive strategies (building resilience) and reactive strategies (corrections) can be combined synergistically. The aim is to develop a deeper understanding of the psychological mechanisms that influence the acceptance of corrections. Furthermore, this dissertation project aims to develop evidence-based recommendations for science communication and internet platforms. The dissemination of misinformation about climate change, particularly through online videos, contributes to public skepticism and hinders necessary climate action. To counter these psychological barriers, research has so far mostly pursued two separate paths: proactive strategies that build resilience against misinformation and reactive strategies that correct misinformation after exposure. This project aims to combine both approaches in an integrated model. A central challenge is the so-called “Continued Influence Effect” - the tendency for information that has already been refuted to continue to influence thinking and beliefs. Experimental studies are therefore investigating how video-based misinformation in particular can be optimally corrected. Design principles from the cognitive theory of multimedia learning (CTML) will be applied. The project tests the central assumption that a combination of a proactive message (e.g. about the scientific consensus) and a subsequent reactive correction has a synergistic, i.e. mutually reinforcing, effect. The results should provide a deeper understanding of concrete psychological mechanisms while providing practical, evidence-based guidance for policy makers, video platform operators and science communicators.

Perception and Action

Duration 09/2024 - open

Multimodal large language models (LLMs) generate texts based on image inputs. This makes them attractive for a wide range of applications where a large amount of image data needs to be processed. One of these applications is the cataloguing of archival images. ArchiveGPT thus focuses on applying a multimodal LLM to archaeological photo material provided by the Leibniz-Zentrum für Archäologie (LEIZA) in Mainz. We investigate the following questions: How does a multimodal LLM perform when confronted with – for the model, often unfamiliar – archaeological objects and terms? How do archive experts (compared to non-experts) perceive the quality of the model’s image descriptions? Can they at all tell the difference between these AI-generated descriptions and descriptions generated by archive experts? How good are they at estimating their ability to distinguish them beforehand? How important is trust in AI in regard to its use? For the first study on these questions, we generated the experimental material in close collaboration with the LEIZA. Provided with photocards from the image archive, a meta-data template usable in an archival cataloging process was generated for each photocard by the multimodal LLM and LEIZA archivists.

Perception and Action

Duration 08/2024 - 04/2026

Our interdisciplinary longitudinal study investigates the evolving dynamics of human-AI interaction over six waves spanning one year. By examining individual, behavioral, and task-related variables, the project aims to uncover how users' trust in, perceptions of, self-efficacy, and willingness to engage with AI systems develop and interrelate over time. The insights gained from this research are essential for better understanding human-machine interaction, a critical foundation for fostering effective collaboration between users and AI systems. This knowledge will inform user-centered AI design and guide the ethical integration of these technologies into various aspects of everyday life.

Perception and Action

Duration 04/2024 - 03/2027

The Leibniz Lab is dedicated to enhancing pandemic preparedness by harnessing the interdisciplinary expertise of 41 Leibniz institutions. Its work spans four central domains: exploring how interactions among the environment, animals, and humans contribute to the emergence and spread of pathogens; mitigating the physical and psychological health impacts of pandemics; optimizing pandemic response strategies; and strengthening the resilience of educational systems in crisis contexts. By integrating diverse perspectives, the Lab functions as a dynamic think tank that complements clinical and infection-control efforts, and provides policymakers and civil society with evidence-based guidance. Recognizing the threat posed by emerging respiratory pathogens, the Lab investigates factors such as alternative livestock farming practices to curb zoonotic transmission, population-level immunity, and the biological mechanisms behind severe disease outcomes. These insights inform strategies to reinforce urban infrastructure and healthcare systems, as well as to enhance educational support for students and teachers during pandemic conditions. In addition, the Lab advances frameworks for robust international collaboration on pandemic preparedness and response. At the IWM, researchers contribute to this effort by examining science communication in pandemic contexts—particularly how individuals navigate and make sense of scientific information in environments saturated with conflicting, ambiguous, or misleading messages.

Perception and Action

Duration 04/2024 - 03/2027

How can we protect biodiversity and the climate while ensuring a stable and resilient food supply? This central question lies at the heart of a research project that seeks innovative answers to this complex challenge. It aims to develop solutions that respect and sustainably use the planet’s limited resources. By bringing together experts from diverse disciplines, the project strives to identify and address knowledge gaps at the intersections of biodiversity, climate, agriculture, and nutrition. Its interdisciplinary approach fosters a holistic understanding of the complex interconnections among these areas. A key focus of the project is linking scientific research with public discourse. It prioritizes the integration of knowledge and the development of transformative solutions that can be applied at local, regional, and international levels. The overarching goal is to support societal shifts toward comprehensive sustainability through the promotion of innovation and evidence-based decision-making. Another essential component is the development of effective strategies for communicating scientific information to the public. This includes actively addressing misinformation related to sustainability. The project reviews and synthesizes various science communication methods, creates educational materials tailored to different audiences, and designs training programs that treat biodiversity, climate, agriculture, and nutrition as interconnected fields. It also explores new ways of transferring knowledge and technology, aiming to make complex information more accessible and engaging. These tools are intended to support both classroom teaching and self-directed learning. To test and refine its approaches, the project will implement activities at five pilot sites located in both developed and developing countries. These sites will help ensure the applicability and effectiveness of its solutions in real-world contexts.

Perception and Action

Duration 11/2023 - open

The IWM's 300 m² experience and experimentation space explores how advanced, innovative technologies, educational research and concepts can be effectively combined to support digital teaching and learning. By enabling hands-on experimentation with emerging technologies, it makes the future of education tangible while encouraging reflection on the opportunities and challenges they present. The goal is to develop well-founded didactic applications for future classrooms. Opened in 2023, the Future Innovation Space (FIS) is part of the “lernen.digital” competence network.

Perception and Action

Duration 10/2023 - 09/2026

Event perception and cognition theories assume dynamic events are segmented into meaningful chunks of sub-actions with partonomic relationships. This allows viewers to process streaming information in units and predict future states of action based on their expectations and event knowledge. Event models store relevant information for events and guide perception using schemas (or scripts). While event models hold immediately accessible representations stored in long-term memory, working event models process perceptual representations of unfolding activity throughout the event. The studies of this project will shed light on whether event processing in working event models and long-term event schemas are modality-dependent. Considering that the grain of action leads to different levels of processing – with fine-grained events being aggregated into coarse-grained events – understanding modal and amodal representations of fine and coarse context will be important to the perceptual and conceptual organization of event comprehension. Furthermore, this project will explore the role of confidence and metacognitive sensitivity in event cognition. Since sensory information is continuously processed at working event models to predict what will happen next, it is important to know if one’s cognition relies on the perception of event boundaries. Results obtained from metacognitive sensitivity measures will provide further evidence for the event models and their interactions with event schemata. Lastly, this project will address whether event schemata influence the processing of events in general and whether repeated exposure to new events changes their cognition. However, the testing of these questions will be applied using visual and verbal events to observe modality-specific effects of different context grains (fine and coarse).

Perception and Action

Duration 03/2023 - open

While historically, the aim of propaganda was to convince citizens of a certain agenda, novel forms of disinformation come with a different goal in mind: To confuse, rather than convince. Or, as former president Trump’s advisor Steve Bannon put it: “The Democrats don’t matter. The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”. Although this zone-flooding strategy poses a serious threat to democratic functioning, it currently lacks empirical investigation that maps out its effects on citizens. We conduct a rigorous, pre-registered investigation into the effects of zone-flooding that harnesses state of the art-methods from Signal Detection Theory and metacognition to illuminate pressing questions: Does zone-flooding affect citizens’ ability to distinguish truth from falsehood? Does it affect their insight into the accuracy of this distinction? Does it render citizens more skeptical or more gullible? And are these effects politically symmetrical?

Perception and Action

Duration 01/2023 - 08/2026

Video-SRS is an interdisciplinary project that focuses on supporting video learning in mathematics by exploring and improving self-regulation. It combines insights from cognitive and educational psychology, mathematics education, and computer science to develop innovative approaches to this type of learning. The use of responsible machine learning algorithms plays a significant role in this process. Specifically, the collaborative project aims to identify and address self-regulation problems in video learning by automatically recognizing when such problems occur and providing appropriate and automated assistance. Similarly, the project aims to recognize suboptimal characteristics of instructional videos that could assist learners in selection and creators in the production of better videos. On the educational side, the project focuses on the study of learning for derivation, as there is a great need for learning in this area among German students. Methodologically, the project not only utilizes machine learning techniques, but also analyzes video materials, log file data from video platforms, and multimodal sensor data from individual video learners, such as eye movement data. Where possible, these analyses are triangulated to make the best possible statements about self-regulation problems and their solutions. The goal of the project is both to deepen theoretical insights into the role of self-regulation in video learning and to obtain practical approaches for optimizing learning.

Perception and Action

Duration 02/2021 - 01/2025

As the world becomes increasingly technologically forward, the presence of artificial agents in day-to-day life also becomes more apparent. Studying the interaction between humans and artificial agents, such as robots, has long been in the research spotlight. While research in this field is traditionally focused on how robots can improve our lives, this PhD project aims at flipping the focus on humans helping robots.

Perception and Action

Duration 01/2020 - open

Narratives communicate information in many ways, for example in books, audio dramas, films, or visual narrations like comics. While there is extensive research on text or film comprehension, relatively little is known about comic comprehension. Visual narratives, however, offer many possibilities in formal and informal education settings. This project therefore addresses the question how we comprehend and process visual narratives like comics.

Perception and Action

Duration 01/2012 - open

It is generally believed that humans prefer information that confirms their attitudes and avoid information that represents opposing views. Striving for confirmation and congeniality are also held responsible for a number of toxic phenomena on the Internet, such as the emergence of echo chambers and filter bubbles, the polarization of society, or the dissemination of misinformation. The present project investigates how people deal with opposing opinions – are they really ignored?