Heinrich-Heine-Universitaet Duesseldorf
Institute of Experimental Psychology
Universitaetsstr.1
40225 Duesseldorf / Germany
Welcome
at the
Institute of Experimental Psychology
Prof. Dr. Karl Theodor Kalveram
Cybernetical Psychology and Psychobiology
Technische Universität Darmstadt
Alexanderstr. 10
64289 Darmstadt / Germany
phone: +49(0)6151 16 75551 (office)
+49(0)6151 16 75667 (lab)
In day-to-day operations and sciences as well, control mostly means the manipulation of an object in a manner which turns the object's actual properties into desired properties. Communication commonly paraphrases transfer or exchange of knowledge. The merits of cybernetics are the provision of both a formal language and a mathematical background which allow to describe and handle respective problems unambiguously.
Most of the research of the former "Cybernetical Psychology" group into to the fields Sensori-Motor Behavior, Speech Control and Stuttering, Effects of Noise on Men, and Human Behavioral Control is listed in the following pages.
In 2006 I joined the "Lauflabor" in Jena. There I am engaged in the control of hopping and walking robots, and in human treadmill experiments with weight compensation.
Fields of research:
Sensori-Motor Behavior
Speech Control, Stuttering
Annoyance due to Noise
Human Behavioral Control
Figure 1: Brief explication of the cybernetical approach.
In a system consisting of two subsystems called controller and plant, the output variable of one subsystem is an input variable of the counterpart. So, controller and plant depend on each other in a circular manner. The free variables goal and disturbance make both subsystems depend also on further influences. The goal represents the desire of a superordinate system how the plant's output should look like. The controller's task is to keep the plant's output coinciding with the goal, though disturbances cause deviations. Other deviations arise if the action chosen by the controller leads to an undesired reaction of the plant.
Referring to biological and psychological applications, the controller is thought to be embodied in the individual, and the plant denotes an object embedded into the environment. Feedback then denotes the sensed (measured) reaction of the object to a prior manipulative action of the individual's controller. In social interaction, the object is another individual or a group of individuals.
The challenge is the experimental verification that a presumed strategy of control and/or communication is indeed applied by an individual.
