Research Areas

My research interest is in visual perception. Currently, I investigate whether there are interactions between the processing of optic flow and the processing of biological motion; two highly relevant visual processes in everyday-life. I use psychophysical methods to test possible interactions between the two processes.
My previous research projects addressed recognition and feature integration of dynamic objects in the brain, biological motion detection in natural scenes, neural correlates of foreign language learning in adulthood, cortical representations of different word types, duration perception in crossmodally-defined intervals, haptic search and visuo-haptic cue-weighting in the brain.

Selected Publications

Mayer, K. M., Macedonia, M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2017). Recently learned foreign abstract and conrete nouns are represented in distinct cortical areas similar to the native language. Human Brain Mapping 38:4398-4412 (2017)


Mayer, K. M., Thornton, I. M., & Vuong, V. C. (2017). Humans are detected more efficiently than machines in the context of natural scenes. Japanese Psychological Research, 59(2). doi: 10.1111/jpr.12145


Mayer, K. M., Vuong, V. C., & Thornton, I. M. (2015). Do people “pop out”? PLOS ONE, 10(10). doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0139618


Mayer, K. M., Yildiz, I.B., Macedonia, M., & von Kriegstein, K. (2015). Visual and motor cortices differentially support the translation of foreign language vocabulary. Current Biology, 25(4). doi: 10.1016/j.cub.2014.11.068


Mayer, K. M., Di Luca, M., & Ernst, M. O. (2014). Duration perception in crossmodally-defined intervals. Acta Psychologica, 147(2-9). doi: 10.1016/j.actpsy.2013.07.009 

Academic CV

Honors and Awards

Invited speaker at the Rank Prize Meeting, Grasmere, Great Britain, February 2012