MRI: Acquisition of an Eye Tracking System

该奖项支持购买Eyelink Portable Duo眼球跟踪系统，以促进迦太基学院(一家小型文科机构)的教职员工和本科生研究人员的科学探索。Eyelink系统通过对近红外光波从参与者的角膜反弹时的非侵入性测量，为研究人员提供了参与者正在计算机屏幕上观看的连续报告(相对于实验方案内的事件)。人们的大多数眼球运动都不是他们有意识地控制的。因此，眼动是许多情境中在线认知活动的稳健衡量标准，并经常被用作注意力的替代衡量标准。迦太基学院各学科的研究人员将使用Eyelink探索各种主题，包括：眼球运动和意识之间的关系，视力如何在视野中变化，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，以及专家和新手古生物学家在考古挖掘中的视觉搜索行为。除了促进研究，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--下面讨论--都将涉及本科生研究人员，从而为学生提供了一个丰富的机会，让他们获得使用这一最先进的研究工具的实践经验。两名主要研究人员是心理科学系的教员，他们经常邀请本科生参加高级论文和暑期研究项目，来自其他多个系的附属教员也表示有兴趣将Eyelink整合到他们的研究项目和学生项目中。主要研究人员研究如何从视觉环境中提取信息。Eyelink将促进对这一领域的假设进行更直接的测试。一项研究将探索对无关听觉节奏的牵连是否会影响阅读过程中眼跳的产生，这一结果可能会在阅读过程中相互竞争的眼动模型之间做出判断。在类似的脉络中，一系列研究将探索在观看自然环境时快速眼跳的发生，即短潜伏期(80-100毫秒)的眼跳运动。这种对自然主义观赏条件下的感知的兴趣在另外两个项目中得到了呼应。第一个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继续影响动态的、真实世界的刺激的捕获。第二部分考察了在更自然的条件下视野的不均一性。

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.