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DR. HARUN KARIMPUR

Metaverse Advisory Lead | Strategy & Innovation Consulting
Extended Reality ASG @Accenture

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I am responsible for Strategy & Innovation Consulting in the area of emerging technologies. I leverage my background in Cognitive Neuroscience, where I gained insights from complex data streams. How do humans interact in their environment? How can we creative impactful digital solutions? To answer these questions I have been using a multi-methodological approach leading to experience with a wide range of tools such as Virtual Reality, Motion Capture, Psychophysics and Surveys.

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I worked for European Active Observer project as a member of the Center for Mind, Brain, & Behavior (CMBB) and alumnus of the German Academic Scholarship Foundation

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*** NEWS ***

Feb, 2023

Spatial Representations are fundamental for digital experiences!
Excited to share our paper has been published and made it onto the cover of Nature Reviews Psychology

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Mar, 2022

Our toolbox for VR studies has been published in Behavior Research Methods!

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Nov, 2021

I am honored to receive a best dissertation award in my field for my past research!

May, 2021
Make sure to check out our Python-based toolbox for perception & action studies and meet my colleague Immo Schütz for a Q&A at the 2021 VSS conference.

May, 2020
I received an Elsevier / Vision Research Travel Award! Excited to present my work @VSS2020!

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PROJECT AREAS

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Image by Michał Parzuchowski

SPATIAL CODING

I'm interested in solving complex problems related to how the brain computes and represents spatial information facilitating our actions in reach space or navigation. I am working on questions like:

  • Which perceptual mechanisms influence our actions in space?

  • How do different frames of reference interact?

  • How can landmarks facilitate spatial orientation and object interaction?

EMBODIMENT

Our senses provide us with information that, once integrated, can lead to fascinating phenomena such as embodiment. I aim to understand the underlying factors that make up this sense of one's own body. VR allows us to trick the senses and maintain a high degree of experimental control. I use a holistic approach in which I combine objective measures such as electrodermal activity and movement kinematics.

INTUITIVE PHYSICS

"This floor is quite slippery!"
In our everyday lives, we rarely need formulas to get an estimate of physical properties in our environment. In some cases, our predictions fail. But why is that the case? Why do we integrate unreliable cues? In a recent project, I started to look into this issue.

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PUBLICATIONS

PEER REVIEWED JOURNAL ARTICLES

  • Fiehler, K. & Karimpur, H. (2023). Spatial Coding for action across spatial scales. Nature Reviews Psychology.
     

  • Forster, P.-P., Karimpur, H., & Fiehler, K. (2022). Demand characteristics challenge effects in embodiment and presence. Scientific Reports, 12, Article 14084.
     

  • Forster, P.-P., Karimpur, H., & Fiehler, K. (2022). Why we should rethink our approach to embodiment and presence. Frontiers in Virtual Reality: 3, Article 838369.
     

  • Schuetz, I., Karimpur, H., & Fiehler, K. (2022). vexptoolbox: A software toolbox for human behavior studies using the Vizard virtual reality platform. Behavior Research Methods. Advance online publication.
     

  • Crowe, E., Bossard, M., Karimpur, H., Rushton, S., Fiehler, K., & Brenner, E. (2021). Further evidence that people rely on egocentric information to guide a cursor to a visible target. Perception, 50(10).

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  • Karimpur, H., Kurz, J., & Fiehler, K. (2020). The role of perception and action on the use of allocentric information in a large-scale virtual environment. Experimental Brain Research, 238(9), 1813-1826.

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  • Karimpur, H., Eftekharifar, S., Troje, N. F., & Fiehler, K. (2020). Spatial coding for memory-guided reaching in visual and pictorial spaces. Journal of Vision, 20(4), Article 1.
     

  • Cretenoud, F. A., Karimpur, H., Grzeczkowski, L., Francis, G., Hamburger, K., & Herzog, H. M. (2019). Factors underlying visual illusions are illusion-specific but not feature-specific. Journal of Vision, 19(14), Article 12.
     

  • Karimpur, H., Morgenstern, Y., & Fiehler, K. (2019) Facilitation of allocentric coding by virtue of object-semantics. Scientific Reports, 9, Article 6263.
     

  • Hamburger, K., Ragni, M., Karimpur, H., Franzmeier, I., Wedell, F., & Knauff, M. (2018). TMS applied to V1 can facilitate reasoning. Experimental Brain Research, 236(8), 2277–2286.
     

  • Karimpur, H., & Hamburger, K. (2018). A rat in the sewer: How mental imagery interacts with object recognition. PLOS ONE, 13(3), Article e0194227.
     

  • Balaban, C. Z., Karimpur, H.*, Röser, F., & Hamburger, K. (2017). Turn left where you felt unhappy: how affect influences landmark-based wayfinding. Cognitive Processing, 18(2), 135–144. [*shared first authorship]
     

  • Karimpur, H., & Hamburger, K. (2016). Multimodal integration of spatial information: The influence of object-related factors and self-reported strategies. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 1443.
     

  • Karimpur, H., Röser, F., & Hamburger, K. (2016). Finding the return path: Landmark position effects and the influence of perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 7, Article 1956.
     

  • Karimpur, H., & Hamburger, K. (2015). The future of action video games in psychological research and application. Frontiers in Psychology, 6, Article 1747.

CONFERENCE CONTRIBUTIONS

  • Schütz, I., Karimpur, H., & Fiehler, K. (2021). A toolbox for perception and action experiments using the Vizard VR platform. Presented at the 21th Annual Meeting of the Vision Science Society.
     

  • Karimpur, H., Kurz, J., & Fiehler, K. (2020). From reaching to walking: How we build robust spatial representations for visually guided actions. Presented at the 20th Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society.
     

  • Karimpur, H., Schmidt, F., & Fiehler, K. (2019). How spatial coding is affected by mid-level visual object properties within and outside of peripersonal space. Presented at the 19th Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society. St. Pete Beach, FL, USA.
     

  • Karimpur, H., & Fiehler, K. (2018). Semantics determine the influence of allocentric information in memory-guided reaching. Presented at the 18th Annual Meeting of the Vision Sciences Society. St. Pete Beach, FL, USA.
     

  • Karimpur, H., & Fiehler, K. (2018). Semantics determine the influence of allocentric information in memory-guided reaching. Talk given at the 60th Conference of Experimental Psychologists (TeaP). Marburg, Germany.
     

  • Cretenoud, F. A., Karimpur, H., Grzeczkowski, L., Francis, G., Hamburger, K., & Herzog, H. M. (2017). How many factors are there in vision? Poster presented at the 40th European Conference on Visual Perception. Berlin, Germany.

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RESEARCH EXPERIENCE

SCIENTIST AT THE ACTIVE OBSERVER (TAO) PROJECT

Jul 2019 - Sep 2021| Giessen, DE & Cardiff, GB

TAO is a research project involving three European locations (Giessen, Cardiff, Amsterdam) with the goal to strengthen collaborations and use synergies to understand the interactions between human perception, cognition and action. I created digital experiences in mixed-reality and combined them with modern data science methods to gain insights on human movement and human-object interactions.

RESEARCH ASSOCIATE WITH THE IRTG 1901 "THE BRAIN IN ACTION"

Dec 2017 - Jun 2019 | Giessen, DE & Toronto, CA

The International Research Training Group 1901 comprises five locations across Canada and Germany, and aims to understand the processes underlying perception and action in everyday life. As an associated member, I had the pleasure to collaborate with the BioMotionLab (Prof. Niko Troje) in Toronto in addition to my projects at the Perception & Action Lab (Experimental Psychology, Justus Liebig University Giessen).

COMPUTATIONAL SENSORY-MOTOR NEUROSCIENCE SUMMER SCHOOL

Summer 2018 | Minneapolis, USA

Project Title: Deviations of friction estimation in intuitive physics
Professors Gunnar Blohm (Queen's U, CA), Konrad Körding (U Penn, USA) and Paul Schrater (U Minnesota, USA)

STANFORD UNIVERSITY

Summer 2017 | Stanford USA

Visiting Student Researcher
Department of Psychology | Language & Cognition Lab
Prof. Michael C. Frank

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HONORS & AWARDS

BEST DISSERTATION AWARD

Awarded by the JLU for my research in the field of cognitive neuroscience

ELSEVIER / VISION RESEARCH TRAVEL AWARD

Awarded in support of my attendance and the research presented at the 20th Annual Meeting of the Vision Science Society

STIPENDIUM - STUDIENSTIFTUNG DES DEUTSCHEN VOLKES
(GERMAN ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION)

Scholarship awarded in support of  my dissertation project in Psychology (accepted and declined below)

STIPENDIUM - GIESSEN DISSERTATION FELLOWSHIP
(JUSTUS LIEBIG UNIVERSITY GIESSEN)

Scholarship awarded in support of my dissertation project in Psychology

STIPENDIUM - STUDIENSTIFTUNG DES DEUTSCHEN VOLKES
(GERMAN ACADEMIC SCHOLARSHIP FOUNDATION)

Scholarship awarded in support of M.Sc. in Psychology

WINNER OF THE TREASURE CHEST CHALLENGE

awarded by the IRTG 1901 "The Brain in Action" in support of a research project

STIPENDIUM - DAAD
(GERMAN ACADEMIC EXCHANGE SERVICE)

Scholarship awarded in support of the research stay at Stanford University

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CONTACT

hkarimpur [at] outlook.com

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