Dr. Simon J. Büchner studied Cognitive Science and Philosophy in Freiburg and Cognitive Psychology in Amherst, Massachusetts, supported by scholarships from the Baden-Württemberg Foundation and the Fulbright Commission. He then worked in interdisciplinary research projects on human spatial navigation and received a PhD in Psychology from the University of Freiburg. As a graduate student, he was a visiting researcher at Concordia University, Montréal.
Dr. Büchner is responsible for the Major Life Sciences. This includes the development of the curriculum, the course offerings per semester, recruiting and supporting Teaching Fellows, as well as thesis supervision.
I give lectures and seminars in the Life Sciences and Core of the LAS program. I introduced Problem-Based Learning (PBL) to selected courses, which showed to be suitable for this type of teaching. PBL is a student-centered learning method, which uses real-world cases as an incentive to start an active process of learning by the students as a group and as an individual based on prior knowledge they already have. In the Introduction to Life Sciences class, I use the flipped classroom approach.
My research covered the areas of perception, attention, and decision making mostly in the context of spatial cognition and wayfinding, both in laboratory settings as well as in the field. This included research on the allocation of attention in large-scale complex spaces and the interaction of bottom-up perceptual factors and top-down factors such as the participant’s goal. The methods I used include stationary and mobile eye-tracking, behavioral experiments, and self-assessment among others. Further research interests include Applied Cognition, Visual Attention, and Consciousness.
The following are projects funded via the Studierendenvorschlagsbudget.