Tobias Thomas

Tobias Thomas joined the lab as a PhD student in December 2021.

From 2021 until 2025 he was working on the hessian.ai project „The Third wave of artificial intelligence“.

Starting 2026, he is now part of the „Reasonable Artifical Intelligence“ excellence cluster.

My research interests revolve around human perception and decision making, especially in natural environments. To understand those phenomena, I use behavioral experiments including psychophysics and eye-tracking, as well as computational modeling, especially Bayesian and reinforcement learning methods.

• Dong, D. T., Li, J., Thomas, T., & Smith, L. B. (2026). The Statistics of Natural Experience. In Analytical Connectionism School (pp. 126-150). PMLR.
• Thomas, T., Straub, D., Tatai, F., Shene, M., Tosik, T., Kersting, K., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2024). Modelling dataset bias in machine-learned theories of economic decision-making. Nature Human Behaviour, 8(4), 679-691. [html]
• Kadner, F., Thomas, T., Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A. (2023). Improving saliency models' predictions of the next fixation with humans' intrinsic cost of gaze shifts. In Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Winter Conference on Applications of Computer Vision (pp. 2104-2114)
  [html]
• Thomas, T., Hoppe, D., & Rothkopf, C. A., The neuroeconomics of individual differences in saccadic decisions, 2022
  [bioRxiv]

• Preference elicitation reveals stable individual differences in costs of saccadic eye movements, VSS 2026, St. Pete Beach FL USA [Poster]
• Inhibition of return depends on image category, VSS 2024, St. Pete Beach FL USA [poster]
• Modelling dataset bias in machine-learned theories of economic decision-making, SAP Innovation Series 2024, Online [talk]
• Improving saliency models' predictions of the next fixation with humans' intrinsic cost of gaze shifts, WACV 2023, Waikoloa HI USA [talk + poster]
• Measuring the cost function of saccadic decisions reveals stable individual gaze preferences, VSS 2022, St. Pete Beach FL USA [talk]

David Pietras: Inhibition of return in active vision depends on image category (B.Sc.)

Niclas Dobbertin: Modeling of Transfer in Complex Tasks (M.Sc.)

Milan Vukosavljev: A think-aloud study of a checkmate pattern in chess (B.Sc.)

Olha Melnyk: What’s Next? Predicting Intentions from Visuomotor Coordination in Natural Behaviour (B.Sc.)

Vahan Demirci: Comparing Humans’ and Statistical Learning Methods’ Predictive Ability using Visual Behavior (M.Sc.)

Elisa Schäfer: How do meta learned curiosity programs depend on task structure? (M.Sc.)