With the beginning of this year, we started an exciting new project called “How visual actions shape active vision”, and like all European projects it goes by an acronym: VIS-Á-VIS. It is a five-year project funded through an ERC Consolidator Grant, awarded to Martin by the European Research Council. So far, we have hired two postdocs and two PhD students to work on this project. Two of them have already arrived: Wiebe Nörenberg starts her PhD, and Lukasz Grzeczkowski is a new postdoc in the lab.

In this project, we aim to find out if and how the active visual system learns and exploits lawful relations between visual actions (eye head and body movements) and their sensory consequences, to give rise to the seamless continuity that defines perception and action in behaving agents. The project thus challenges the long-standing idea that the immediate sensory consequences of visual actions — the rapid retinal motion imposed by our own movements — are a nuisance to visual processing. We will investigate whether, instead, these sensory consequences support core functions in active vision.