Goals       The goal of the European Research Conference program is to present uncoventional ideas and new approaches in a relaxed and secluded atmosphere to stimulate discussion and interaction among the participants. The conference is also intended to provide educational material for the attending students. Thus, the speakers will provide enough background information about their research topics during their lectures, to allow everybody not intimately familiar with their fields to follow the presentations and discussions. Although, the conference is open to researchers world wide, the greater portion of the support funds for speakers and stipends for students has to be earmarked for nationals of the European Union member states. Synopsis       In recent years, a quite substantial increase in neuroscience research about perceptual mechanisms has taken place, elucidating the role of various cortical and also subcortical structures in cognitive processing. This is largely due to the current wide availability of non-invasive neuroimaging techniques in humans (such as fMRI, PET and MEG) in conjunction with psychophysical and electrophysiological techniques. These findings now complement the classical behavioral-neurophysiological paradigms in monkeys and other mammals. One of the most challenging questions in this context concerns the links between findings obtained in humans and in monkeys. To arrive at a meaningful comparison, the relevant data material needs to be screened and analyzed within the concerned research groups in order to establish homologies and analogies between humans and non-human primates. While definite answers are not as yet close at hand, this research conference will bring together scientists interested in the representation of three-dimensional space in relation to movement detection in cortical areas of primates, i.e., monkeys and humans. One goal of the meeting will be to discuss and narrow down such homologies. Under normal every-day life conditions, the detection of active and passive movements involves the non-conflicting interaction of a number of sensory inputs, such as visual, vestibular and proprioceptive information. Traditionally, the cortical mechanisms of movement detection have been studied to a large extent in relation to visual input analysis. However, recent experiments have demonstrated an almost ubiquitous presence of vestibular information in the relevant cortical regions. Thus, one further goal of the conference will be to try to link expertise and knowledge of scientists approaching movement analysis from the visual and from the vestibular input side to the cortex. Lastly, neuroimaging techniques have shown involvement of a number of non-neocortical areas, e.g., the cerebellum, in cognitive processes. The relevance and implications of such structures for preceptual mechanisms is largely not understood as yet. The conference will thus also provide a forum to discuss these still unresolved issues. Analysis of three-dimensional movement is currently one of the most researched topics in cognitive neuroscience because the necessary investigative tools (three-dimensional eye movement recordings, three-dimensional visual and vestibular stimulation) now have become widely available. The specific focus and originality of the meeting will be to re-define and specify the cortical and non-cortical areas involved in multisensory processing of movement perception in three-dimensional space.

| Cortical neuronal mechanisms and psychophysics of orientation and motion in three-dimensional space | | Description of the meeting | Program | Abstracts | Organization | Various |