The University of Potsdam - A portrait
Profile
Models of Thinking
Area of Excellence: Cognitive Sciences
Photo: Unicom/Photocase
When reading a text like the one before you, one hardly notices how much the brain has to perform: how individual words are recognized, background noise is filtered out, and missing syllables are filled in. The cognitive sciences are looking to understand these highly complex processes.
The mathematical models of human thinking that were developed at the Interdisciplinary Center for Cognitive Studies at the University of Potsdam enjoy international recognition. Research in the area of cognitive sciences began with a cooperation between the linguistic Collaborative Research Centre "Information Structures" and the Faculty of Science. By now the cognitive sciences have become an area of excellence and a unique feature of the University of Potsdam. In order to better understand the processes of the brain, perception and memory as well as thinking and language, psychologists have been collaborating with mathematicians, linguists with physicists, and biologists with computer scientists.
A prominent example is the large-scale study of eye movement during reading activities. While test persons read simple sentences on a screen, a camera records the path that their eyes take during the activity. Straight lines and jumps as well as back movements and curves show which strategies a reader develops to perceive a sentence, to understand it, and finally to remember it. Researchers hope to analyze this extremely complex and dynamic process and to make it possible to improve the ability to compensate for reading difficulties and to facilitate the overall reading learning process.
Another area of application for Potsdam's cognitive sciences can be found in patholinguistics. The use of more effective methods enables children with speech impediments to be treated more successfully and stroke patients to regain their speaking abilities more quickly. The research area also includes the psychomotor and sports medical investigations of complex motion sequences in top athletes.
Cognitive scientists are making new connections across the disciplines to German and Romance studies in order to find out together how emotion and language influence one another. Last but not least, the focus area is concerned with the dialog between humans and machines: computer linguists translate into programs the rules that humans use to formulate their thoughts. They are facing what is possibly the most difficult challenge for computer scientists: giving machines our language.
"In the Cognitive Sciences at the University of Potsdam
we focus on nothing less than the basis of human
communication and other complex mental and motor abilities."
Prof. Dr. Reinhold Kliegl, ,
Director of the Cognitive Sciences Area of Excellence
Photo: K. Fritze
