Physics of Human Sensing

Understanding human perception is an interdisciplinary endeavor, with much recent progress thanks to combining concepts and methods across fields. Here we propose to focus on physical aspects of human sensing. This pertains to describing the stimuli in the outer world in physical terms (such as the propagation and superposition of sound waves) as well as to physical phenomena in the sensory organ itself (such as the coupling of sound waves into collective motion of hair cells in the cochlea, the optics of the eye and their relation to retinal structure and spectral sensitivity, the frequency-dependence of skin mechanics, or the thermal effusivity and resistance at the skin-material contact).
In this workshop we will discuss experimental and modelling approaches to understanding the physics of human sensing. From molecular switching forces on receptor molecules to the tracking of micro-saccadic eye movements, from collective oscillation models of sensory cells to the contact mechanics of skin deformation, we will cover all relevant length and energy scales. We will share experiences of experiments with human participants and our concepts of transferring insights into novel technological aids to our senses. The main goal of the workshop is to identify the multiple ways in which physics research can improve our understanding of unimodal and multimodal perception.
We thus invite physically inclined researchers on human sensing to join us in finding synergies and novel joint approaches towards comprehensive interdisciplinary models.

The conference language will be English. The Wilhelm and Else Heraeus-Foundation bears the cost of full-board accommodation for all participants.