2026 Keynote Speaker

Nina M. Hanning, PhD
ERC Research Group Leader
Institut für Psychologie
Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin

hanning.nina@gmail.com
nina.hanning@hu-berlin.de

Abstract: Measuring Perception Without Shaping It: New Tools for Active Vision

Every eye movement reshapes visual input. Perception does not simply react to gaze shifts—it is already dynamically tuned in the moments leading up to action. Capturing these rapid perceptual dynamics is a central goal in vision science, yet it poses a methodological challenge: the more precisely we try to measure sensitivity around eye movements, the more our experimental tools risk biasing the very processes we aim to observe.

Classic approaches often rely on tightly controlled protocols that cue isolated eye movements to predefined locations and times. While this enables fine temporal alignment, it also introduces important limitations: behavior becomes unnatural, observers can anticipate when and where stimuli will appear, and many paradigms are difficult to extend beyond narrow samples of healthy young participants. A key objective for the field is therefore to develop methods that preserve rigor while increasing ecological validity and accessibility. In this keynote, I will discuss recent work toward this goal. I will highlight stimulus and task designs that allow visual sensitivity to be probed without salient transients that alter perceptual processing or influence eye-movement planning. I will demonstrate how such approaches can reveal subtle perceptual dynamics across saccades, dissociate genuine sensorimotor updating from stimulus-driven artifacts, and provide characteristic perceptual signatures across eye movements. Alongside these measurement advances, I will show how eye movements themselves can serve as powerful no-report readouts of perceptual and behavioral priority, offering new ways to infer what the visual system selects and processes under more natural conditions.

Together, these advances illustrate how refining our measurement toolbox can broaden the validity and reach of active vision research—offering a path toward studies in broader populations such as children, older adults, and clinical groups—and bringing us closer to understanding perception as it unfolds in natural vision.