28.09.2016
Wilhelm-Wundt-Medaille for Prof. Dr. Gegenfurtner
Karl Gegenfurtner received Wilhelm Wundt Medal at the 50th DGPs Congress in Leipzig.
Nr. 174 • 28. September 2016
The President of the DGPs Prof. Dr. Andrea Abele-Brehm presents the Wilhelm Wundt Medal to Prof. Dr. Karl Gegenfurtner, JLU. Photo: DGPs / Christian Modla
The nationally and internationally highly respected experimental psychologist from Giessen, Prof. Dr. Karl Gegenfurtner, can look forward to further recognition of his research work. At a ceremony during the 50th DGPs Congress of the German Psychological Society (DGPs) in Leipzig, Prof. Gegenfurtner, head of the Department of General Psychology at Justus Liebig University Giessen (JLU), recently received the Wilhelm Wundt Medal.
In the laudation by GDPs President Prof. Dr. Andrea Abele-Brehm, it is stated that Prof. Gegenfurtner "uses very different research approaches to conduct perceptual psychology at the highest methodological and theoretical level, repeatedly challenging classical doctrines with innovative experiments and developing groundbreaking findings for neuroscientific research approaches."
JLU President Prof. Dr. Joybrato Mukherjee warmly congratulates Prof. Gegenfurtner on this award. He emphasizes: "Prof. Gegenfurtner's groundbreaking research enables us to better understand fundamental processes in the field of perception and action that have been little known until now." And he adds, referring to the long tradition of psychology at the University of Giessen: "One of the founding sites of modern psychology is located in Giessen, where Robert Sommer organized the world's first congress for experimental psychology in 1904 and where the influential Gestalt psychologist Kurt Koffka taught from 1911 on. The current research is further evidence of the excellence in the Department of Psychology at JLU in the very best tradition."
The focus of Prof. Gegenfurtner's work, which was once again particularly acknowledged in this context, is on the information processing processes of the human visual system. He is interested in the relationships between elementary sensory processes, higher visual cognition and the interaction of perception and action. His goals include understanding how complex scenes and objects in natural environments are recognized and represented in the perceptual system/brain and how object perception is used to control movement. The scientist has addressed these general questions in very different innovative research approaches, as the laudation further stated. This has resulted in highly regarded publications in Annual Review of Neuroscience, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, Nature and Current Biology, among others.
Another field of research of Prof. Gegenfurtner together with his team is the interaction of perception and motor activity. Among other things, the scientists have investigated the importance of eye movements for the perception of natural scenes. Furthermore, perception and action during grasping movements were investigated.
Prof. Dr. Karl Gegenfurtner
Karl Gegenfurtner studied psychology at the University of Regensburg. He then spent seven years in New York, where he received his PhD in Experimental Psychology and was a post-doctoral fellow at the Center for Neural Science and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute at New York University. In 1993, he returned to Germany to the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics. In 2000, he was initially appointed to a professorship in Biological Psychology in Magdeburg, before accepting an appointment at JLU in Giessen in 2001. Prof. Gegenfurtner is head of the Department of General Psychology at JLU and has received numerous awards for his work.
Prof. Gegenfurtner has initiated several research associations and has thus had a very structure-forming effect on the subject of psychology, as the German Psychological Society also points out - among other things with a research group "Perception and Action", an international research training group (NeuroAct: Brain and Behavior), and since 2014 with a DFG Collaborative Research Center "Cardinal mechanisms of perception: Prediction, Valuation, Categorization".
Starting in 2005, Prof. Gegenfurtner was also funded for five years under the Reinhart Koselleck Program of the German Research Foundation (DFG), which is reserved for project ideas by excellent individual scientists. With the help of the €1.25 million in funding, he and his team investigated the perception of material properties - a previously unexplored area. Prof. Gegenfurtner is a member of the Leopoldina, the National Academy of Sciences.
Wilhelm-Wundt-Medaille
Every two years, the German Society of Psychology (DGPs) awards prizes and honors for outstanding scientific achievements and services to psychology on the occasion of its congress. In this context, the Wilhelm Wundt Medal is awarded for outstanding scientific achievements in the field of psychology. This award is given to active research personalities who have achieved the highest professional recognition through significant work in basic empirical psychological research. The award of the Wilhelm Wundt Medal is associated with honorary membership in the German Psychological Society. According to the DGPs, this award is intended to honor scientists whose empirical work represents a research program that pursues innovative approaches and problem solutions in basic psychological research, that has a significant influence on a field of research in psychology, and that has received national and international professional recognition.
- More Information
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