Marianne Maertens

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Room FR 6002
Tel.: 030 - 314 24478
Email: marianne.maertens@tu-berlin.de

Sekretariat MAR 5-3
Marchstrasse 23
10587 Berlin

Sprechstunde

Thursday, 14.00 - 15.00

Research topic

I am interested in visual perception, in particular in a perceptual process called scene segmentation. The retinal image of stimuli in our environment, known in perceptual psychology as the proximal stimulus, is nothing more than a twodimensional spatio-geometrical energy pattern. In order to apply familiar perceptual categories such as 'solid object', 'shade', 'transparent figure' and so on, to refer to different image regions, somehow during visual processing surface structure has to be assigned to the parts of the image. A number of 'problems' make that task a non-trivial one. One is that, due to occlusion, pieces that belong to a single object might be disconnected in space. The visual system has the remarkable ability to perceptually complete shapes, even across large distances in space. In one of our projects we study the cues that trigger perceptual completion, the temporal efficiency of perceptual completion and the neural responses to perceptually completed shapes [more].

Another 'problem' arises, because the intensity values at different image regions do not necessarily map in a simple way to the perceived intensity of a surface or an object located at that position. Two surfaces might reflect the same amount of light and yet their inferred surface color might be perceived to be fairly different. We are interested in the question whether, and if, to what extent or under which circumstances, the perceived intensity or apparent brightness of a surface influences so-called low-level perceptual parameters like the difference threshold [more].

Curriculum Vitae