Name Erich Schroger | Role Psychologist | |
Education Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich | ||
Erich Schröger (born 11 November 1958 in Munich) is a German psychologist and neuroscientist.
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Biography
Erich Schröger studied philosophy and psychology at the Munich School of Philosophy and at the Ludwig Maximilians University (LMU) in Munich. In 1982, he earned a Baccalaureat in Philosophy, in 1986 he earned a Diploma in Psychology, and in 1991 he was awarded a PhD from the LMU for his work on loudness constancy. After research stays at the Cognitive Brain Research unit of the University of Helsinki (Finland) and a stint of teaching at the Catholic University of Eichstätt, Schröger achieved his Habilitation in psychology in 1996 at LMU.
In 1997, Schröger was appointed to the University of Leipzig as a professor of Biological Psychology. Since 2001 he has held its Chair of Cognitive and Biological Psychology and has been the Head of the research group BioCog.
From 1999-2002, Schröger served as Vice-Dean of the Faculty for Biological Sciences, Pharmacy, and Psychology at the University of Leipzig. In 2014, he was appointed Dean of the Faculty. Schröger's other service roles at the university include: from 2002-2004, Director of the Institute for General Psychology; from 2003-2004, Head of the Psychological Institutes; in 2005 and from 2010-2013, Dean for Study Affairs in Psychology.
Research
Schröger's main fields of research include perception, attention, and memory. He mainly works in audition, but he also investigates visual and multimodal mechanisms of human information processing. Among other scientific contributions, he has developed an experimental paradigm for assessing the mechanisms of automatic distraction of attention by changes of task-irrelevant stimulus information. Contributing to the work of the Finnish psychologist Risto Näätänen, Schröger has described important processes on which the detection of violations in regular stimulus sequences is based. For example, he was able to show that such automatic change detection involves both sensory adaptation processes and cognitive comparison processes of sensory memory. Furthermore, Schröger is interested in the History and Methods of Psychology.
In December 2008, Schröger was granted a Reinhart Koselleck Project by the German Research Council (DFG). The main research issue of this project is the mechanism of predictive modeling in audition. Specifically, Schröger investigates how automatic predictions about upcoming auditory events can be generated on the basis of regular environmental stimulation. Due to this mechanism, for example, incoming acoustic stimuli can be processed with astonishing speed as when comprehending spoken language or localizing moving sounds. Likewise, the specific processing of self-induced auditory stimuli—stimuli that a person creates by means of its own behavior—can be explained by the principles of predictive modeling. In order to optimize a predictive model, the information processing system calculates predictive errors as the difference between the prediction and the actual stimulus signal.
For his scientific work, Erich Schröger received the 1996 Distinguished Scientific Award for Early Career – Contribution to Psychophysiology from the Society for Psychophysiological Research (SPR). From 2004 to 2011, he has been a Fellow of the Review Board for Psychology within the German Research Council (DFG), and from 2012 to 2015, he has been appointed to the Selection Committee for the Allocation of Alexander von Humboldt Foundation research awards. As of September 2013, Schröger has published about 250 scientific papers and book chapters, and he has been an honorary reviewer for more than 100 scientific journals and organizations.