Browsing by Author "Gert, Anna L."

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    Coordinating with a robot partner affects neural processing related to action monitoring
    (2021) Czeszumski, Artur; Gert, Anna L.; Keshava, Ashima; Ghadirzadeh, Ali; Kalthoff, Tilman; Ehinger, Benedikt V.; Tiessen, Max; Björkman, Mårten; Kragic, Danica; König, Peter
    Robots start to play a role in our social landscape, and they are progressively becoming responsive, both physically and socially. It begs the question of how humans react to and interact with robots in a coordinated manner and what the neural underpinnings of such behavior are. This exploratory study aims to understand the differences in human-human and human-robot interactions at a behavioral level and from a neurophysiological perspective. For this purpose, we adapted a collaborative dynamical paradigm from the literature. We asked 12 participants to hold two corners of a tablet while collaboratively guiding a ball around a circular track either with another participant or a robot. In irregular intervals, the ball was perturbed outward creating an artificial error in the behavior, which required corrective measures to return to the circular track again. Concurrently, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG). In the behavioral data, we found an increased velocity and positional error of the ball from the track in the human-human condition vs. human-robot condition. For the EEG data, we computed event-related potentials. We found a significant difference between human and robot partners driven by significant clusters at fronto-central electrodes. The amplitudes were stronger with a robot partner, suggesting a different neural processing. All in all, our exploratory study suggests that coordinating with robots affects action monitoring related processing. In the investigated paradigm, human participants treat errors during human-robot interaction differently from those made during interactions with other humans. These results can improve communication between humans and robot with the use of neural activity in real-time.
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    WildLab : a naturalistic free viewing experiment reveals previously unknown electroencephalography signatures of face processing
    (2022) Gert, Anna L.; Ehinger, Benedikt V.; Timm, Silja; Kietzmann, Tim C.; König, Peter
    Neural mechanisms of face perception are predominantly studied in well‐controlled experimental settings that involve random stimulus sequences and fixed eye positions. Although powerful, the employed paradigms are far from what constitutes natural vision. Here, we demonstrate the feasibility of ecologically more valid experimental paradigms using natural viewing behaviour, by combining a free viewing paradigm on natural scenes, free of photographer bias, with advanced data processing techniques that correct for overlap effects and co‐varying non‐linear dependencies of multiple eye movement parameters. We validate this approach by replicating classic N170 effects in neural responses, triggered by fixation onsets (fixation event‐related potentials [fERPs]). Importantly, besides finding a strong correlation between both experiments, our more natural stimulus paradigm yielded smaller variability between subjects than the classic setup. Moving beyond classic temporal and spatial effect locations, our experiment furthermore revealed previously unknown signatures of face processing: This includes category‐specific modulation of the event‐related potential (ERP)'s amplitude even before fixation onset, as well as adaptation effects across subsequent fixations depending on their history.