MRI: Acquisition of an Eye Tracking System

该奖项支持购买EyeLink便携式双眼追踪系统，以促进迦太基学院（一个小型的文科机构）的教师和本科生研究人员的科学探索。当近红外光波从参与者的角膜反弹时，EyeLink系统通过对近红外光波的非侵入性测量，为研究人员提供了参与者在计算机屏幕上看的位置（相对于实验协议中的事件）的连续报告。人们所做的大多数眼球运动都不在他们的意识控制之下。因此，在许多情况下，眼球运动是在线认知活动的有力衡量标准，经常被用作注意力的替代衡量标准。迦太基学院（Carthage College）的跨学科研究人员将使用EyeLink来探索各种主题，包括：眼球运动与意识之间的关系、视力如何在整个视野中变化、眼球运动规划的时间进程、字体的可读性、与视频游戏的互动，以及考古挖掘中专家和新手古生物学家的视觉搜索行为。除了促进研究之外，EyeLink还将与心理科学课程的内容相结合，以巩固和加强相关概念，并增加学生接触尖端研究方法的机会。所有提议的研究（下文将讨论）都将涉及本科生研究人员，从而为学生提供丰富的机会来获得使用这一最先进的研究工具的实践经验。两位主要研究人员是心理科学系的教师，他们经常让本科生参与高年级论文和暑期研究项目，而来自其他各种系的附属教师也表示有兴趣将EyeLink整合到他们的研究项目和学生项目中。主要研究人员研究信息是如何从视觉环境中采样的。EyeLink将促进对这一领域的假设进行更直接的测试。一项研究将探讨在阅读过程中，不相关的听觉节奏是否会影响扫视的产生，这一结果可以在阅读过程中判断不同的眼球运动模式。类似地，一系列的研究将探索在观看自然环境时，表达性扫视的发生，即短潜伏期（80-100毫秒）的扫视眼运动。这种对自然观赏条件下感知的兴趣在另外两个项目中得到了回应。第一项研究探讨了在人工实验室任务中调节注意力捕获的因素是否会继续影响动态、现实世界刺激的捕获。第二项研究在更自然的条件下的视野不均匀性。

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.