Research Interests Prof. W. Schwarz

It is well-known that humans (as well as animals) respond faster to redundant sensory signals as compared to any of these signals alone, and part of my work, both experimental and theoretical, aimed at a better understanding of this so-called redundant signals effect (RSE). Our experimental attempts [Schwarz (1996), Schwarz & Ischebeck (1994), Schwarz (2006), Schwarz & Kühn (2008), Schwarz & Miller (2014)] looked into the stimulus dependence, the temporal dynamics, and the boundary conditions of the RSE. The models [Schwarz (1994a), Schwarz (1989b), Schwarz (2006)] that I have proposed to account for the basic findings focus on the idea that the redundancy gain arises as a superposition of neural counting or diffusion activation processes, thereby combining the available sensory evidence so that the separate signals effectively 'coactivate' the required motor response.

My work with John Foley [Foley & Schwarz (1998)] looks at how quantitative properties of the psychophysical threshold vs. contrast (TvC) function in grating detection depends on attentional cueing. Other work that I have done in perception looks at the effects of subliminal flankers in the Eriksen paradigm [Schwarz & Mecklinger (1995)], at space/time-relations and excentricity effects in visual search [Schwarz (1993c)], random dot pattern discrimination [Schwarz (1990a)], visual search (Schwarz & Miller, 2016) or binocular summation [Schwarz (1992a)].