The mission of the Helmholtz Institute is to study perception, cognition, emotion and motor behaviour on various levels of complexity (cells, organs and organism). Presently, it is generally accepted that these functions are manifestations of the same information processing system and should be studied together. In order to study the phenomena successfully, a multi-disciplinary approach is essential in which concepts and methods from neurophysiology, biophysics, psychophysics and psychology are integrated. Integration refers to strengthening the neurobiological foundation of perception and behaviour, necessary to bridge the gap between the neuronal signals and cognitive functions. Main topics of research are vision, haptics, spatial cognition, attention, emotion, memory and bird song learning. Predominant techniques are psychophysics, recording of behaviour (recording of limb and eye movements), brain imaging (electro-physiology, fMRI, MEG, EEG/ERP, two-photon imaging), neural stimulation (TMS, intracranial stimulation) and computational modelling and simulations.
