Marius H Raab

Ohm Nuremberg Tech

Gamification ist die Anwendung spieltypischer Elemente in spielfremden Kontexten. Aber welche Mechaniken verbergen sich in Spielen – und woraus beziehen sie ihre motivationale Kraft? Eine Lehrkooperation zwischen der Fakultät Informatik (TH Nürnberg) und dem Lehrstuhl für Allgemeine Psychologie und Methodenlehre (Uni Bamberg) bringt Master-Studiere...

Verschwörungstheorien können als subjektive Theorien betrachtet werden, die von Menschen entwickelt werden, um weitreichende negative Ereignisse erklären zu können. Entsprechend können Methoden zur Erforschung subjektiver Theorien auch in der Erforschung (subjektiver) Verschwörungstheorien von Nutzen sein. In der hier vorgestellten Studie sollte un...

Start-ups gelten als idealtypisch agil und dienen als Vorbild für Umstrukturierungen in Unternehmen. Die Grounded-Theory-Studie rekonstruiert, wie in agil organisierten Start-ups mit Belastung und Beanspruchung umgegangen wird. Eine optimierte Stressgestaltung prägt die Arbeit, die durch eine große Bandbreite von Aufgaben, enge Zeitzyklen und ein a...

In this paper we argue that a philosophically and psychologically grounded autonomous agent is able to learn recursive rules from basic sensorimotor input. A sensorimotor graph of the agent's environment is generated that stores and optimises beneficial motor activations in evaluated sensor space by employing temporal Hebbian learning. This results...

Creating works under very limited resources is a constant topic of contemporary art, and also of many forms of artistic expression throughout the 20th century. At the same time, shortages in energy, scarceness of raw materials, and concerns about pollution demand a critical reflection of one’s environmental footprint―artists are no exception. Howev...

Societal change is mirrored by aesthetic zeitgeist on different dimensions. From a technical point of view, new modes of production allow for new modes of artistic expression. On a more psychological level, our view on the world and on or fellow humans gets radically altered by technological and societal disruptions; which, in turn, become visible...

The medium is the message (McLuhan): In the case of Nintendo’s ”Gameboy“, the medium was a message that defined a generation. Pixelated 8-bit greyscale pictures signified that video game entertainment has become independent from temporal and spatial restrictions. The medium was fit for the pocket, powered by batteries and affordable for the masses....

A wide variety of sociocultural trends continuously flanks the globally expanding digitization. The ongoing enthusiasm for so-called ASMR (Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response) videos that are described as having the potential to trigger very strong thrills and chills, often termed “head orgasms”, needs rigorous scientific testing which has not yet...

Media images are fleeting: One day’s lead photographs might be forgotten the very next day. Some images, however, become ingrained in our collective memory. Those iconic photos attain a very high recognition value. Famous examples are the “Guerrillero heroic” photo by Alberto Korda, depicting Che Guevara, or Sam Shaw’s “flying skirt” photo of Maril...

In the early days of computers, massive constraints (screen resolution, color palette, processing power) were responsible for a reductionistic and very distinct`look and feel´of games and applications. Today, this style (pixel art) is deliberately employed.

Humans act according to theories. Noteworthy, theories are not only a matter of science. Instead, they structure and permeate virtually every aspect of human life. The Heidelberg Structure-Formation Technique is a qualitative method to visualize so-called subjective theories. It is not limited to a particular area. This technique was, for instance,...

Using 3D-Software for researching body ideals in self-perception and the perception of others.

Sex dolls have evolved over the last decades and are getting more popular. Whether sex doll ownership should be protected as a sexual right that facilitates sexual health or whether its usage might be harmful to women and society is vividly discussed. In this polarized debate, empirical research is scarce and possible differentiations in the psycho...

Presenting pictures of people with and without facial masks, we employed a 6-AFC paradigm (emotional states happy, angry, fearful, sad, disgusted, and neutral), accompanied by a confidence rating of the own recognition performance. Simultaneously, we recorded participants’ gaze via an eye tracker and their facial expression via a HD video camera to...

The days of 320 by 200 pixel displays and a 16 colour palette might be gone, but even with cutting-edge technology, digital art is shaped by constraints in several dimensions such as resolution, colour space, and in the palette of tools the artist can potentially use. Human-computer-interfaces are a bottleneck and nowhere close to the haptic feedba...

The materiality of art and its impact on aesthetic appreciation has been discussed widely and recently, but mostly for paintings. The physical realization of a work, with the specific usage of the canvas, brushes and colours resulting in artistic styles, peculiarities and specific types of imperfection, can shape our impressions and our appreciatio...

Our fovea centralis, the area on our retina that allows for sharp and highly accurate vision, is small: only about 1.5 mm in diameter, with an even smaller area of around 0.5 mm where no blood vessels impede the light trajectory. This approximates around 4.5-1.5 visual degrees, respectively; coarsely the area of our thumb when we extend our arm. Mu...

Despite lacking scientific proof, thinking about extraterrestrials and extraterrestrial intelligence is part of our psychological reality. It is often stated that cultural and scientific reception and representation of these strange entities suffer from anthropocentric bias. To profoundly investigate such bias and the minds of extraterrestrials, we...

Many aspects of handling the COVID-19 pandemic bear a resemblance to patterns found in games. We observe point displays and leader boards, the visible assumption of roles, classic archetypes, the collection of resources, and spatial awareness. We argue that these patterns manifest spontaneously as a form of analogical reasoning, because people lack...

Many aspects of handling the COVID-19 pandemic in Western countries bear resemblance to game-design patterns like point displays and leader boards, the visible assumption of roles, classic archetypes, collection and hoarding of resources, and spatial awareness. We argue that these patterns emerge as people lack cultural and individual norms and cog...

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.” These lines from Leonard Cohen’s ‘Anthem’ remind us that insight, the glimpse of ideal concepts, can be evoked by imperfection. Art has, over the centuries, incorporated ‘cracks’ to open our eyes for invisible ideas: deliberate imperfections in Gothic cathedrals, the concept of Baroque...

Positive effects of aesthetically appreciated designs have long been studied and confirmed since the 19th century: such designs are more enjoyable, they are more forgivable for glitches and can increase users’ performance. In the field of information visualization, studies of aesthetics are still a niche approach. In the current study, we aim to sp...

Die Digitalisierung der Hochschullehre ermöglicht flexible Lehr- und Lernszenarien, stellt aber auch hohe Anforderungen an die Selbstmotivation der Studierenden. Ein innovativer Ansatz zur motivierenden Gestaltung von Lehr- und Lernprozessen ist die Anwendung von Gamification, d. h. von spieltypischen Elementen in spielfremden Kontexten (Deterding...

Our visual system provides us with a seamless experience: Missing sensory information is filled-in by top-down processes; for example, the retina’s blind spot is intelligently filled-in with most probable visual information (Reiter & Carbon, 2012). These mechanisms operate outside our awareness by default, making it hard to experience their nature...

Graphs are abstract representations of complex object-relation structures; graph visualisations used in virtually all fields of science, from physics and biology, over psychology, up to humanities and social network analysis. Kurosu and Kashimura (1995) confirmed that aesthetic qualities play a major role in usability—and thus, understanding. Our s...

The perception of artworks rarely—if ever—results in the instantiation of a determinate meaning. Instead, when entering an art gallery, we often expect Semantic Instability (SeIns): the experience of perceptual and cognitive habits being challenged. By comparing the experience of an artistic movie in an exhibition with the experience in a laborator...

In diesem Kapitel schildern wir Verschwörungstheorien, die bei uns weitgehend unbekannt sind, an anderen Orten auf dem Erdball aber für heiße Diskussionen sorgen. Es geht um geheime Tunnelsysteme, um Flugzeugabstürze und: lange Unterhosen.

Konfrontiert mit einer spezifischen Verschwörungstheorie steht man vor der Frage: Wie damit umgehen? Wir diskutieren kritisch, wie man einer Theorie auf den Zahn fühlt.

Wann entstand die erste Verschwörungstheorie? Sicher wissen können wir das nicht. Wir nehmen aber an, dass die erste Verschwörungstheorie etwa 12.000 Jahre vor Beginn unserer Zeitrechnung entstand, irgendwo im heutigen Syrien. Seitdem sind Geschichten über Verschwörungen Teil unserer Kulturgeschichte.

In den bisherigen Kapiteln haben wir uns damit beschäftigt, was die Faszination von Verschwörungstheorien ausmacht und warum sie grundlegende menschliche Bedürfnisse nach historischen Zusammenhängen, Unterhaltung, Ästhetik und Wahrnehmung bedienen. Aber unsere Betrachtung wäre nicht vollständig, wenn wir uns nicht auch kritisch mit dem Begriff „The...

Muss eine Verschwörungstheorie tatsächlich eine einfache Erklärung für komplexe Ereignisse bieten, um sich zu verbreiten? Studien zeigen, dass wir es genießen, in einem Moment des Heureka verborgene Zusammenhänge aufzudecken - und diese müssen nicht unbedingt einfach sein. Schon das Potenzial für Erkenntnisgewinn erzeugt Interesse!

Obwohl wir zu prägnanten/einfachen Deutungen tendieren, überschätzen wir manchmal die Komplexität von Ereignissen. Auch Verschwörungstheorien sind nicht immer die einfachsten Varianten der Verknüpfung von Ereignissen.

Die drei Herausforderungen – Postmoderne, Postdemokratie, Postfaktizität – sind alle nicht neu, werden aber in dieser Kombination von den Menschen als immer bedrohlicher erlebt. Dies kann ein Grund dafür sein, dass Menschen nach alternativen Erklärungen für wichtige Ereignisse und gesellschaftliche Vorgänge suchen.

Wer etwas bauen kann, der weiß um die Bestandteile und um deren Funktion. Darum wollen wir Ihnen einen Baukasten für Verschwörungstheorien vorstellen: Was Sie bauen können, verstehen Sie auch besser. Das kann dann besonders nützlich sein, wenn es um eine Verschwörungstheorie geht, gegen die Sie angehen wollen – beispielsweise, weil sie zum Hass auf...

Angesichts der in ihren Resultaten schrecklichsten Verschwörungstheorie – dem Vorwurf, jüdische Menschen hätten sich weltweit im Geheimen verabredet, um die Herrschaft über die gesamte Menschheit zu erringen – stehen wir fassungslos da. Was sind das für Menschen, die sich solche Theorien ausdenken und verbreiten; und die sie vor allem glauben? Wir...

Die blaue oder die rote Kapsel? Mit dieser Entscheidung bestimmt Neo, die Hauptfigur im Science-Fiction-Film Matrix (1999) der Wachowski-Geschwister, sein weiteres Schicksal. Vor die Wahl stellt ihn Morpheus, eine rätselhafte und charismatische Figur. Neo entscheidet sich für die rote Kapsel – für ein Ausbrechen aus der simulierten Realität, die se...

In diesem Kapitel stellen wir Ihnen einige berühmte Werke der fiktionalen Literatur vor, mit Schwerpunkt auf Science-Fiction. Wir haben sie ausgewählt nach dem Kriterium, dass sie ihrer Zeit voraus waren – dass sie also entstanden sind, während die dargestellten gesellschaftlichen Entwicklungen noch keine Selbstverständlichkeit waren. Die folgenden...

Wir erinnern uns, denken und träumen in Geschichten. Zugleich haben wir den Drang, Zusammenhänge zu entdecken und unwillkürlich Kausalitäten und Intentionen wahrzunehmen. Diese Mechanismen sind die Bausteine der ersten Verdachtsmomente von Verschwörungen. Narrative Universalien sind wiederkehrende Erzählelemente über verschiedene Zeiten und Kulture...

Die Suche nach der Wahrheit ist also, wie in den vorigen Kapiteln dargestellt, eine beschwerliche. Wir können uns auf den Weg machen, aber am Ziel – bei der endgültigen Wahrheit – können wir niemals ankommen. Es gibt keine absolute Gewissheit. Diese Unschärfe bietet Raum für Verschwörungstheorien. Darunter sind solche, die uns auf einen rutschigen...

Eine These, die wir in diesem Buch vertreten: Verschwörungstheorien greifen Ängste auf. Selbst hinter der Lange-Unterhosen-Theorie steht eine Angst, nämlich die, dass die Grenze zwischen Russland und China einmal infrage gestellt werden könnte und ein verheerender Krieg zwischen den beiden Großmächten die Folge wäre. Die Beyoncé-hat-Sia-entführt-Th...

People typically process information to confirm their prior held attitudes and stereotypes. As the political relations between NATO and Russia have distinctively drifted apart in recent years, we were interested in how far old-established color depictions referring to the Cold War’s demarcations (USSR = red; NATO = blue) might reinforce people’s po...

Significant events are frequently followed by discussions about the event's ?true nature?. Yet, there is only little evidence whether the conspiratorial reasoning of conspiracy believers and sceptics is a priori determined, or if certain characteristics of information are responsible for provoking a polarization. We investigated how depicted causat...

Research has shown that in many real-world contexts, like reading newspaper or watching newscast, people do not process information in a neutral way; instead, they search for information trying to confirm their previously held attitudes and stereotypes. As Russia and the NATO have again politically drifted apart in recent years, we were interested...

Faced with the temporal dynamics of aesthetic experience, in visual arts as well as in other artistic forms (e.g. film and music), conventional psychological measures (like interviews and questionnaires) reach their limits; essentially, such measures disrupt the experience and they only allow very limited data points. We present, compare and discus...

This dissertation will explore conspiracy theories from a psychological viewpoint—both theoretically and empirically. Conspiracy theories are introduced here as a phenomenon relevant for many aspects of entertainment, history, popular culture, society, politics, and ideology. The phenomenon is defined and discussed, with its epistemic characteristi...

A world divided into East versus West: The so-called Ukraine crisis has once more summoned outdated patterns of political thinking. Simultaneously, media discourses have flared up debating diplomatic and military solutions as possible policy responses. A majority of Germans, however, have remained hesitant to advocate any escalation of military con...

Research in the field of psychological aesthetics points to the appeal of stimuli which defy easy recognition by being “semantically unstable” but which still allow for creating meaning—in the ongoing process of elaborative perception or as an end product of the entire process. Such effects were reported for hidden images (Muth and Carbon, 2013) as...

People often listen to sad music in spite of its seemingly negative qualities. Sad music, and especially sad music with a personal significance, has been shown to evoke a wide span of emotions with both positive and negative qualities. We compared emotional responses to familiar self-selected sad music (SSSM) with both unfamiliar sad and unfamiliar...

Research in perception and appreciation is often focused on snapshots, stills of experience. Static approaches allow for multidimensional assessment, but are unable to catch the crucial dynamics of affective and perceptual processes; for instance, aesthetic phenomena such as the “Aesthetic-Aha” (the increase in liking after the sudden detection of...

We present a framework for cognitive modeling of aesthetic decision making based on dynamic prototypes. Starting point of our work is empirical evidence which shows that subjects’ initial ratings of attractiveness of objects can be influenced by adapting them to new, typically more innovative objects. The framework consists of three steps: (1) Esti...

Reptile prime ministers and flying Nazi saucers-extreme and sometimes off-wall conclusion are typical ingredients of conspiracy theories. While individual differences are a common research topic concerning conspiracy theories, the role of extreme statements in the process of acquiring and passing on conspiratorial stories has not been regarded in a...

Recent studies on conspiracy theories employ standardized questionnaires, thus neglecting their narrative qualities by reducing them to mere statements. Recipients are considered as consumers only. Two empirical studies-a conventional survey (n = 63) and a study using the method of narrative construction (n = 30)-which were recently conducted by th...

Proceedings of KogWis 2012. 11th Biannual Conference of the German Cognitive Science Society

In the post-proceedings of the Workshop "Visibility in Information Spaces and in Geographic Environments" a selection of research papers is presented where the topic of visibility is addressed in different contexts. Visibility governs information selection in geographic environments as well as in information spaces and in cognition. The users of so...

In this paper we argue that a philosophically and psychologically grounded autonomous agent is able to learn recursive rules from basic sensorimotor input. A sensorimotor graph of the agent’s environment is generated that stores and optimises beneficial motor activations in evaluated sensor space by employing temporal Hebbian learning. This results...