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Possible BA's/MA's Thesis Topics

We offer a supervision for theses dealing with the following topics (additional topics may be possible upon request):

 

Supervisor: Martin Fischer (martinf@uni-potsdam.de)

  • Action simulation: we use grip force, eye tracking, and various behavioural measures to understand what goes on in the mind when people comprehend spoken or written language, including arithmetic. Example paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/174702181880925
  • Role of the body for cognition: we manipulate body parts (posturing, blocking, …) to see if this affects various cognitive tasks. Examples include how finger movements affect calculation, or how we attend differently to things near our hands (e.g., on tablets), or how breathing affects cognition. Example paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-021-06147-z
  • Control of physical distance, for example when touching humanoid robots. Example paper: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12369-021-00749-x
  • Data visualization: we examine basic cognitive principles to develop guidelines for user-friendly graph design. Example paper: https://doi.org/10.1177/15291006211051956
  • Religion and Attention:  How does religious experience affect our cognitive processes, in particular how we attend in space? With simple reaction time experiments we want to measure the effect of religious words on spatial attention.  A recent review is here:  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2023.101022
  • I also supervise well-developed research topics proposed by students if they fall within my area of competence (but not on clinical psychology).

 

Supervisor: Katharina Kühne (kkuehneuni-potsdamde)

  • Human-robot interaction;
  • Perception and acceptance of social robots;
  • Social effects replication with social robots;
  • (Clinical) application of social robots.

 

Supervisor: Jochen Laubrock (laubrockuni-potsdamde)

  • The attentional blink as a measure of cognitive processing;
  • Measuring expertise using eye tracking;
  • Pupillometry as a measure of cognitive effort;
  • The interface of vision and language: How do we understand visual scenes?
  • The role of prediction in linguistic and visual processing.

 

from July 2023

Supervisor: Carlotta Zona (zonauni-potsdamde)

  • Embodied Arithmetic:  We study the relationship between body movements and mental processes, especially with simple number processing tasks. An example reference is: https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02453

 

In case you are interested and/or have questions please refer directly to the supervisor.