Great news for HapLab! We are thrilled to announce that Bora Celebi and Didem Katircilar were honored for their excellent Work-in-Progress contributions to WorldHaptics 2025 in Suwon, South Korea.

Bora received the Best Work-in-Progress Award for the study:
Celebi, Cavdan, & Drewing. Vibrations Feel Longer than their Visual Analogs in Virtual Reality.

Didem earned an Honorable Mention for the work:
Katircilar, Celebi, Drewing. The Power of Social Touch: Pleasantness is a Matter of Regularity.

This highlights our outstanding contributions to the field of haptics. 

Congratulations to Bora and Didem! We look forward to seeing more visionary work from them in the future.

As part of the interdisciplinary ChronoPilot project,  our partners from Ghent University (Amrapali Pednekar and Alvaro Garrido) and the University of Luxembourg (Stéven Picard) visited the lab to set up our multi-user experiment. This highly innovative research focuses on enhancing perceived time through multisensory manipulation using physiological and psychological responses of the user. The goal is to improve mental states through multisensory input, combining findings from earlier stages of the project.  

The newly developed ChronoPilot device uses an adaptive algorithm to modulate the perception of time. For instance, when under pressure to meet a deadline, stress levels typically rise. By subtly shifting the apparent time, the device aims to reduce this stress and support more effective task performance.

Marei Wehinger is a psychology student in the fourth-year of her Bachelor's degree here at Justus Liebig University Giessen. Alongside her studies, she works as a tutor as part of the Experimental Psychology Laboratory Course.

She has been given the opportunity for a three-month internship at HapLab, during which she will support Qingyu Sun in his work to develop a model for the perception of softness in fabrics.

Qingyu Sun is a second-year Ph.D. student in the Department of Information Science and Technology at The University of Tokyo. Previously, he worked with Prof. Okamoto to study the mechanisms of roughness perception. Currently, he is under the supervision of Prof. Shinoda to investigate the rendering and evaluation of softness perception in ultrasonic haptics.

During the 3-month internship in Haplab, he will work with Prof. Drewing, attempting to develop a model for the perception of softness in fabrics. 

Nazlı is a second-year psychology student at Bahçeşehir University (BAU), İstanbul. She did her internship at a psychology clinic for six months. She has been selected for Erasmus+ Traineeship Program to visit Justus-Liebig University of Giessen - HapLab for two months. She is working on the UNTOUCH project to widen our understanding of unpleasant materials at the HapLab with Dr. Müge Cavdan. Her main research interests are sensory integration and auditory perception. 

Daniel-Phillip recently received his M.Sc. in Psychology from JLU Giessen, focusing on perceived value in haptic perception. 

He aspires to continue this research alongside his work and training as a psychotherapist. 

Marco Ziegler defended his doctoral thesis titled "Mechanisms of Approximate Numerosity Processing: Approximate Number of Tasks in the Haptic and Visual Modality" on the 18th of december in 2023.

We congratulate him to his dissertation and wish him the best for the future!

We are very happy to welcome Halid Oğuz Serçe (left to the photo) & Elif Didar Dingil (right to the photo) to HapLab Team. They both received an Erasmus+ mobility grant to visit us, congrats! 

Halid is a third-year psychology student at Bahçeşehir University (BAU), İstanbul. He has been working as an undergraduate research assistant in the BAU Brain and Cognition Research Laboratory for two years. He has been selected for Erasmus+ Traineeship Program to visit Justus-Liebig University of Giessen - HapLab for two months. He is currently involved in the ChronoPilot project which aims to understand the nature of time perception. His main academic interests are time perception and metacognition.

Elif is a 3rd-year psychology student at Abdullah Gül University in Türkiye. She received the Erasmus+ Internship Grant and was admitted to Haptic Lab for two months. She was also selected for Patient Innovation Bootcamp for designing an app that includes neurofeedback to help ADHD and Depression patients. She is working on the Untouch project to understand different mechanisms of unpleasantness at the HapLab with Dr. Müge Cavdan. Her research interest includes emotion and attention.

We are happy to welcome a new member to the team!

Before moving to the HapLab team, Nedim researched eye movement at the University of Marburg - being part of an international research training group (IRTG 1901 - The Brain in Action). We are looking forward to a long and fruitful collaboration!

Professor Dr Roland Bennewitz is a physicist, who specializes in nanotribology - leading a program that investigates the mechanical properties of material - at the INM institution of Leibniz. He will be visiting the HapLab until the 3rd of July (03.07.2023). Working together with the HapLab team, he is interested in investigating the integration of fingertip friction into the perception of materials.  We are looking forward to the fruitful collaborations!

Poster Session Surface and Texture (29.08.2022) - How prior information affects exploratory movement direction in texture perception as a function of information quality and task difficulty by Michaela Jeschke, Aaron Zöller, & Knut Drewing 

Poster Session Temporal Processing (30.08.2022) - Effect of spatial cueing on haptically perceived  time at human torso by Bora Celebi, Müge Cavdan, & Knut Drewing 

Poster Session Multisensory Perception (29.08.2022) - Auditory localization performance can be enhanced by both visual and audiovisual short-term training by Didem Katircilar, Simge Merve Vit, Nergis Birasoglu, Dilara Deniz Türk, & Funda Yildirim 

We had a great time talking to people about our ChronoPilot project and how we use vibratactile stimulation to investigate and modulate human time perception.