Joan López-Moliner

VISCA Group – Active perception and sensorimotor integration

ORCID Research Profile

JOAN LÓPEZ-MOLINER

Position: Professor titular

Research team

 

Angels Colome Gonzalez

Associate Professor

angels.colome (at) ub.edu

 

Matthias Sven Keil

Senior postdoc (Ramón y Cajal fellow)

matskeil (at) ub.edu

 

Elisabet Tubau Sala

Associate Professor

etubau (at) ub.edu

 

Daniel Linares Herreros

Postdoctoral Researcher

linares (at) ub.edu

 

David Aguilar Lleyda

Early stage researcher

daguilar (at) ub.edu

 

Clara Cámara López

Early stage researcher

clara.camara (at) ub.edu

 

Elisabeth Knelange

Early stage researcher

l.knelange(at) ub.edu

 

Björn Jörges

b_jorges(at) ub.edu

Early stage researcher

Contact details

 

Dr. Joan López-Moliner

Department of Psicologia Bàsica

Faculty of Psychology, Passeig de la Vall d’Hebron 171

08035 Barcelona (Spain)

+34 933125143

j.lopezmoliner (at) ub.edu

www.ub.edu/viscagroup/joan

Research Interests

 

We address how people make optimal decisions at different levels (sensory, motor and cognitive) in complex and rich environments. First, optimal decision making depends on people encoding and decoding sensory information reliably. We then study how humans decode this sensory information to reflect the 3D layout of the environment in order to unfold motor actions more efficiently. Second, we address how motor predictions are integrated with sensory feedback information (e.g. visual, proprioceptive, auditory) in order to make the necessary motor adjustments to accomplish the goals: minimizing errors or maximizing gains. From optimality frameworks we can then characterize the underlying processes that lead to optimal decisions from a computational point of view. Finally, the same principles are used to approach decision making at a more central level (e.g. cognitive tasks).

Current Research Lines

 

  • Sensorimotor timing and its optimization
  • Decision Making and Gain/value representation in perception/action
  • Spatial attention and perception
  • Number processing
  • Eye movements in Cognitive processing

Technologies/methods

 

  • Psychophysics and sensory measurements.
  • Design of 3D visual stimulation and virtual reality.
  • Behavioural/cognitive measurements.
  • 3D Motion tracking and eye tracking in complex environments.
  • Computational modelling, Kalman filters, diffusion processes.

Highlighted publications

 

 

· Jörges, B. J. and López-Moliner, J. (2017). Gravity as a strong prior: Implications for perception and action. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, 11:203.

 

· de la Malla, C., and López-Moliner, J. (2015). Predictive plus online visual information optimizes temporal precision in interception, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 41(5):1271-80.

 

· Cameron, B. D., de la Malla, C., and López-Moliner, J. (2015). Why do movements drift in the dark? Passive versus active me- chanisms of error accumulation, Journal of Neurophysiology, 114(1):390-9.

 

· Johnson E. D, Tubau E. (2015). Comprehension and computation in Bayesian problem solving. Front Psychol. 27;6:938.

 

· Keil MS (2015) Dendritic Pooling of Noisy Threshold Processes Can Explain Many Properties of a Collision-Sensitive Visual Neuron. PLoS Computational Biology 11(10): e1004479.