Teaching

The focus of our teaching activities lies on the acquisition of practical skills in order to efficiently conduct high-quality scientific projects. This starts with basic necessities, such as programming with a scripting language, to be able to pursue projects independently. Following the principles of Open Science, students are encouraged to perform their course work with the goal to share it with the larger scientific community, to expose it to public scrutiny via independent peer-review, and by those means obtain a first hand experience of the scientific process. Successful examples of student-authored publications resulting from such work can be found in:

Häusler, C. O. & Hanke, M. (2016). An annotation of cuts, depicted locations, and temporal progression in the motion picture "Forrest Gump"., F1000Research, 5:2273.
Hanke, M. & Ibe, P. (2016) Lies, irony, and contradiction — an annotation of semantic conflict in the movie "Forrest Gump". F1000Research, 5:2375.
Labs, A., Reich, T., Schulenburg, H., Boennen, M., Gehrke, M., Golz, M., Hartings, B., Hoffmann, N., Keil, S., Perlow, M., Peukmann, A. K., Rabe, L. N., von Sobbe, F.-R. & Hanke, M. (2015). Portrayed emotions in the movie "Forrest Gump". F1000Research, 4:92.

Research Internships

We offer the opportunity for research internships for international students (PhD, high school) and postdocs, ranging from few weeks to several months. Research topics have comprised multivariate data analysis of neuroimaging data, multi-modal datasets from natural stimulation, and computational modeling of behavioral data. The algorithm implementations in the following papers are examples of of such projects:

Dar, A. H., Wagner, A. S. & Hanke, M. (2019). REMoDNaV: Robust Eye Movement Detection for Natural Viewing. bioRxiv. (first two authors contributed equally)
Hanke, M., Dinga, R., Häusler, C., Guntupalli, J. S., Casey, M., Kaule, F. R. & Stadler, S. (2015). High-resolution 7-Tesla fMRI data on the perception of musical genres – an extension to the studyforrest dataset. F1000Research, 4:174.

Theses and Written Coursework

Students are welcome to inquire about thesis topics at any point — and as early as possible. Potential thesis topics range from literature work to more ambitious projects with dedicated acquisition of empirical data or method developments. Projects are typically tailored to the individual interests and capabilities of the respective student. Topics can be inspired by or related to the lab's research activities, but this is not a strict requirement.

Our score sheet provides some information on how submitted theses and course work are evaluated. A LaTeX thesis template that facilitates the writing process can be obtained from the lab's GitHub page.

We offer guidelines (in German) on how to write theses, reports, and articles that are compliant with formal requirements.

Ongoing Thesis Projects

Christian Olaf Häusler (PhD): Evaluating common high-dimensional models of cortical representational spaces for improving the power of neuroimaging-based clinical diagnostics

Completed Theses

Markus Schleicher (M.Sc, Psychology, 2019): Detection of emotional facial expressions from motion capture of facial features from low quality video data with an online capable algorithm
Adina Wagner (M.Sc. Psychology, 2019): Catching the eye: Investigating the functional neuroanatomy of the visuospatial attention system with fMRI and eye gaze recordings during natural stimulation
Konstanze Braun (M.Sc, Psychology, 2018): Social pain in the movie Forrest Gump: Investigating the neural correlates of compassion and empathy
Ulrike Schnaithmann (B.Sc. Psychology, 2017): Combining and testing filter and detection algorithms for post-experimental analysis of eye tracking data on dynamic stimuli
Falko Kaule (PhD, 2017): Untersuchung von Physiologie und Pathophysiologie des menschlichen visuellen Kortex mit funktioneller Magnetresonanztomographie
Pierre Ibe (M.Sc. Psychology, 2017): Effects of observing interpersonal touch in the human brain using natural stimulation
Christian Olaf Häusler (M.Sc. Psychology, 2016): Forrest Gump's world: Spatial perception and cognition during a Hollywood movie
Ayan Sengupta (PhD, 2016): The Effect of Acquisition Resolution and Magnetic Field Strength on Multivariate Decoding of fMRI
Melanie Kienda (M.Sc. Psychology, 2016): Neuronale Verarbeitung von visuell präsentierten emotionalen Reizen und ihre Rolle im visuell-räumlichen Aufmerksamkeitsnetzwerk
Ricarda Lindner (M.Sc. Computational Visualistics, 2015): Browser-basiertes Tool zur semantischen Beschreibung von multiplen Reizen für Hirnaktivitäten
Pierre Ibe (B.Sc. Psychology, 2014): Stimmenerkennung im superioren Temporallappen untersucht mit Hilfe von natürlicher Stimulation und multivariater Musteranalyse: "Bist du das Forrest?"
Jan Zelmer (Diploma Computer Science, 2014): Modellierung von Aufmerksamkeitsnetzen
Daniel Kottke (B.Sc. Computer Science, 2013): Interactive Object Detection in Movies
Friedrich Blum (B.Sc. Psychology, 2013): Kann eine verbale Beschreibung musikalischen Timbres zur Genreunterscheidung herangezogen werden?