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Research Interests

My research rotates around the Sense of Agency in humans and machines.
I've also dipped my toes a bit into Mutlisensory Integration for movement control, particularly when these senses provide conflicting information, e.g. in visuomotor illusions.

Agency

A sense of Agency can be thought of as understanding/ sensing/ feeling that some event was caused by you or one of your action. My favourite stupid example is the following:
Imagine you drive a car or bike and stand at a red traffic light. When you snap your fingers just at the right time (and with the right intention) and the traffic light turns green, you'll have the feeling and childish satisfaction that it was you that made it turn green.

With that very intuitive idea about the Sense of Agency in mind, let me tell you a bit more about it:

Multisensory Control

There are many funny things researchers do for a living. Here, we were looking at standing people. Yep, mostly their task was to stand still.
Ok, sometimes we told them to only stand still on one leg. Or we told them to walk a couple of meters. Maybe we we also let them do that in VR (virtual reality). And yeah, we might have played around with their senses and showed them weird visual stuff or vibrated parts of their body in response to their standing while they had to do just that: stand still.

So, together with my colleagues Celine and Max we had a look at what is called multisensory-integration for balance control and gait. These projects were somewhat aimed at the question how we combine information from multiple sources, such as our eyes (vision), our body (feeling where our hand is without looking at it: proprioception) or our skin (if there is a vibrator sticked to it), to move around in our world or - yeah - stand still. That question becomes especially interesting when either something is off, e.g. when our visual information does not fit our proprioception, or when there is something new, e.g. when we get vibrational feedback about how we stand.

Publications

For an up-to date list please rather look at my google scholar page.

Paper

  • Streiling, K., Schülke, R., Straube, B. et al. Choice- and trial-history effects on causality perception in Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorder. Schizophr 11, 65 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41537-025-00614-0
  • Stasica, M., Honekamp, C., Streiling, K., Penacchio, O., van Dam, L., Seyfarth, A. (2024). Walking on virtual surface patterns leads to changed control strategies. Sensors 2024, 24(16), 5242; https://doi.org/10.3390/s24165242

Posters and Talks at Conferences

  • Streiling, K. (2025). The Mario-Cart Effect - Misattribution of Agency in Continuous Control. Talk at the International Multisensory Research Forum 2025 (IMRF)

  • Streiling, K., Penaz, V. & van Dam, L. C. J. (2025). Agency in Continuous Control. Poster at Adaptive Motion of Animals and Machines 2025 (AMAM).

  • Streiling, K., Stasica, M. A., Bellmann, A., Seyfarth, A. & van Dam, L. C. J. (2024). Human balancing in VR under the influence of optical flow. Poster at European Conference on Visual Perception 2024 (ECVP).

  • Streiling, K. & van Dam, L. C. J. (2023). Influence of visual patterns and optic flow on inverted pendulum balancing tasks. Poster at European Conference on Visual Perception 2023 (ECVP).

  • Stasica M., Streiling K., Honekamp C., Schneider A., Exarchos A., Henschke S., Pirincoglu S., Polat M., Scholz N., Stähler C., Syring E., van Dam L., & Seyfarth A. (2023). Walking on virtual surface patterns changes muscular activity. In CLAWAR2023, October, 2023, Florianópolis