News

Official opening of CNSR 

On June 23, 2022, the CNSR will be officially inaugurated after one year of set-up work. For this purpose, we will open our laboratories to all interested staff and students of Heidelberg University from 3:00 pm. We are especially pleased to welcome the Vice Dean for Research Prof. Jörg Pross and other representatives of the university management.
In addition to guided tours of the labs, the possibilities of the CNSR measurement technique will be demonstrated by means of small experiments. All attendees are invited to participate in these experiments. Here you will find a detailed description of the program.
We would be pleased to welcome you in our facilities!

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Constitutive meeting of the CNSR Advisory Board 

On 21 March, the Advisory Board of the CNSR met for its constitutive meeting.
Members of the board are:

•     Prof. Dr. Silke Hertel (Institute of Educational Sciences and spokesperson of FoF4)
•     Prof. Dr. Dirk Hagemann (Psychological Institute)
•     Prof. Dr. Andreas Voß (Psychological Institute)
•     Dr. Martin Stoffel (Medical Psychology)
•     Dr. Philipp Wanner (Institute of Sport and Sport Sciences)
•     Dr. Torsten Wüstenberg (CNSR)

The work of the Board is coordinated by Dr. Torsten Wüstenberg. Its purpose is to support the management of the CNSR and FoF4 in ensuring the scientific quality of the studies conducted in the CNSR and to advise on strategic decisions. In this sense, all study outlines submitted to the CNSR are reviewed by the Board members and future large-scale equipment orders are assessed with regard to their benefit.

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Show me your emotions 

Since the publication of Charles Darwin's "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" in 1872, generations of scientists have used facial expressions as a proxy for a person's emotional status. At this time, researchers had only their individual observational skills available to them for the study and interpretation of mimic activity. The methodological spectrum for the quantitative and qualitative assessment of such effects has broadened enormously in the last 150 years. Today, in addition to EMG for measuring facial muscle activity, video-based methods are also available that are able to classify facial expressions and assign them to specific emotions with the help of machine learning. The CNSR has also recently been provided with such a system by the company Noldus, which makes it possible to differentiate between happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear and disgust in videos and photos with a high classification quality (Dupré et al., 2020).

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Move it, move it 

The CNSR has received two Perception Neuron 3 inertial sensor-based motion analysis systems. Each of the systems has 18 sensors for a complete measurement of body motor activity. Per second, the sensors are read out up to 600 times and transmitted wirelessly to the acquisition computer. The autonomous operating time of the system is about 1 hour. The potential areas of application for these systems are, for example, in sports science, the control of avatars in VR experiments or the investigation of psychomotor effects of psychiatric diseases.

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Booking system online 

The online booking system of the CNSR has been available since this week. It can be accessed via the menu item "Calendar" and offers all principle investigators the possibility to independently book the resources authorised for their project. The implementation of the data backup algorithms and the online application procedure are planned for the near future.

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