Research focus

Research Group for Environmental & Cognitive Psychology

The research group deals with basic and applied questions of psychology. In the fundamentals we are primarily concerned with perception, movement and thought, in the applications primarily with environmental problems.
The perceptual psychological orientation is strongly (but not exclusively) influenced by the ecological approach; i.e., we understand perception as an active occupation of information acquisition for the purpose of action control. Our specialty is auditory perception, and several experiments have taken place on this (e.g., on the question of how far we can hear force, or on the question of how a sound source is localized in noise). Other basic research projects deal with the visual analysis of complex scenes and interactions between vision and hearing in controlling self-motion. 
Our environmental research projects focus on the effects of environmental noise on the population, barriers to the use of public transportation, and the promotion of energy-efficient behaviors. We collaborate with engineers, administrators and geographers.
In some cases, we combine basic and applied questions, such as how summary judgments of environmental quality are made, and the implications of designing response scales for environmental psychological interviews.