MRI: Acquisition of an Eye Tracking System

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This award supports the purchase of an EyeLink Portable Duo eye-tracking system in the interest of advancing scientific exploration by faculty and undergraduate researchers at Carthage College, a small, liberal-arts institution. The EyeLink system provides researchers with a continuous report of where a participant is looking on a computer screen (relative to events within an experimental protocol) via the non-invasive measurement of near-infrared light waves as they bounce off the participant's cornea. Most of the eye-movements that people make are not under their conscious control. Consequently, eye-movements are a robust measure of online cognitive activity across many contexts and are frequently used as a proxy measure for attention. Researchers across disciplines at Carthage College will be using the EyeLink to explore a variety of topics, including: The relationship between eye-movements and awareness, how acuity changes across the visual field, the timecourse of eye-movement planning, the readability of fonts, interaction with video games, and visual search behaviors of expert and novice paleontologists at an archaeological dig. Beyond facilitating research, the EyeLink will be integrated with content in Psychological Science courses to ground and reinforce relevant concepts and increase student exposure to cutting-edge research methods. All the proposed studies - discussed below -will involve undergraduate researchers, thus affording students a rich opportunity to gain hands-on experience with this state-of-the-art research tool. The two principal investigators are faculty in the Department of Psychological Science who regularly engage undergraduates in senior thesis and summer research projects, and affiliated faculty from a variety of other departments have expressed interest in integrating the EyeLink into their research programs and student projects. The principal investigators study how information is sampled from the visual environment. The EyeLink will facilitate more direct testing of hypotheses in this domain. One study will explore whether entrainment to an irrelevant auditory rhythm impacts saccade generation during reading, an outcome that could adjudicate between competing models of eye-movements in reading. In a similar vein, a series of studies will explore the occurrence of express saccades, saccadic eye movements with a short latency (80-100 msec), during viewing of naturalistic environments. This interest in perception under naturalistic viewing conditions is echoed in two other projects. The first explores whether factors moderating attentional capture in artificial laboratory tasks continue to impact capture with dynamic, real-world stimuli. The second examines visual field inhomogeneities under more naturalistic conditions.