I feel excited and extremely grateful as I am writing this report on my visit to Belgrade, Serbia where I attended the 37th European Conference of Visual Perception (ECVP; 24 – 28 August 2014). The Geoffrey G Burton Memorial Award, awarded by the Applied Vision Association (AVA) not only made it possible to visit and present at one of the largest international conferences on vision but also gave me a flavour of the savagely beautiful Belgrade.
ECVP, held annually since 1978, is a conference dedicated to the workings of vision and multisensory research, providing an opportunity for young and established scientists of different fields (e.g., neuroscience, psychology, biology) to discuss empirical findings and theoretical perspectives. As a travelling conference, ECVP changes its location every year. This year it was held in the largest business centre in Serbia – the luxurious Sava Centre in New Belgrade.
The conference itself was immaculately organised with two excellent invited speakers (Prof. Alan Gilchrist, Rutgers University and Prof. Karl Gegenfurtner, Justus Liebig University Giessen), a technical workshop on light and lots of social events (e.g., cocktail parties, banquet). Moreover, it was very well-attended with 383 poster and 147 talk presentations presented over 4 days in parallel sessions.
I attended all talks of my chosen sessions for the day and thus informed myself about the most current research on attention, eye movements, visual search, biological motion, multisensory processing and perceptual mechanisms. I also presented a talk in the Perception and Action session, entitled “Luminance transients and inhibition of return in a movement-congruency effect.” My presentation incorporated my most recent experiments, examining the characteristics and mechanism of a joint-action phenomenon, known as the movement-congruency effect. Finally, I also attended the conference banquet and the good-bye cocktail party which pleasantly surprised me with delicious Serbian food and spirits.
I would like to thank again all conference organisers for all their hard work which ensured the smooth running of the conference and the AVA for their financial support, without which I would have not been able to be part of such a great international event.