Lincolnshire show

Today, Catia, Kevin and I presented our research at the Lincolnshire show (Catia: Human-dog interaction, Kevin: Genes and cognitive performance, myself: Eye tracking and attention). For the children, there was the visual search task on the laptop. The adults were shown examples of our eye movement research. There were also several enquiries about studying at the University of Lincoln.

EPS Lincoln

The next meeting of the Experimental Psychology Society will take in Lincoln. I will present my study in which I examined whether grouping the attributes of each alternative (by means of a bounding box) in a risky choice leads to more eye movements within a choice (no) and a stronger influence of the expected value difference between the choices (no).

The full abstract can be found in the abstract book.

ECVP

There will be three presentations at ECVP with contributions from my side. My own poster (together with Markus Bindemann and Mike Burton) will be about how quickly social (eye gaze) and symbolic cues (arrows, direction words) can be responded to when they are not presented where the viewer is already looking.  Sunčica Zdravković will present our work on the influence of shadows on people's eye movements. Bert Timmermans will present the results of our dual eye tracking experiment (involving an Eyelink 1000, an Eyelink II, a long network cable, and cross recurrence analysis).

Summer scientist

I will participate with a mouse tracking task in this year's summer scientist. In this event, children can take part in our studies. In my study, I will look at how two cues of direction (eyes gazing and hands pointing) compete for attention.

Instead of using Mouse Tracker I will use mouse tracking in OpenSesame for the simple reason that while OpenSesame could be installed on the lab computers, installing Mousetracker could not (no admin permissions). Using OpenSesame I found that it was easier to present to images simultaneously, and change the feedback given to the participant. Many thanks to Eoin Travers for sharing the mouse tracking script!

Paper in Visual Cognition online

My paper in Visual Cognition is now online (at http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13506285.2015.1042539). Not open access unfortunately, but send me an e-mail for a pre-print (http://staff.lincoln.ac.uk/fhermens).

The paper shows that fixation instruction can influence response times in a gaze cueing paradigm. So unless you would like to find a pattern of results consistent with inhibition of return, it is important to take measures to ensure participants maintain fixation.

First Lincoln data accepted for publication

My first bit of data from Lincoln that has been accepted for publication will appear in a paper together with Sunčica Zdravković. In the article, we show that observers avoid fixation darker regions in images due to (simulated) shadows influence observers' eye movements, in agreement with an optimal sampling strategy.

Reference:

Hermens, F. & Zdravković, S. (in press). Information extraction from shadowed regions in images: An eye movement study. Vision Research.