Thesis Project Form

Perception is a complex process, where prior knowledge is incorporated into the current percept to help the brain cope with sensory uncertainty. This implies that two individuals could perceive differently the very same physical stimulus. Yet, humans are very good at achieving a tight coordination in space and time. This project aims at understanding how a shared perception is achieved, by modelling how visual perception of time and space changes during interaction.

The objective of the research is modeling how being involved in an interaction modifies the perceptual mechanisms supporting visual perception of space and time, with the aim of generalizing the existing Bayesian models describing perception in individual settings to collaborative scenarios.
In particular, it will be of interest to assess whether during interaction a mutual adaptation occurs at the perceptual level, leading to a shared perception. The possibility to exploit such models to improve human-robot interaction will be explored, in order to build collaborative technologies more intuitive and adaptive. The activities will include human psychophysical perceptual and motor testing, comparing perceptual skills in individual (e.g. time judgment) and interactive tasks (e.g. passing an object). The results will be used to develop a model of shared perception, to be potentially implemented on an interactive robot.

Engineering tasks related to this study will include: kinematic data collection, development of the software for human perceptual testing. Research skills such as methods design, data analysis, data interpretation, statistical testing, modeling and signal processing will also be learned and exercised during this project.