eye think lab

Imagine standing in front of a painting, discussing it with a friend. Your eyes will be drawn by characteristics of the image itself as well as what is said. What is the relationship between your eye movements and those of your friend? How is that relationship related to the flow of conversation between you?

In the Eye Chat project we ask people to talk about TV shows, art and politics. We record their gaze as they look at a visual scene related to their conversation. By quantifying the coupling between their eye movements, we are discovering a link between their coordination of visual attention and their mutual understanding. Please visit the Eye Chat homepage to read more about the project.

Imagine (or remember) being the only member of social group in the room. In everyone’s earshot, a person makes a remark about your social group that borders on the offensive. What happens at this point? All eyes in the room turn to you. If you have ever experienced this, it is doubly unpleasant. Not only has your social group been besmirched, but suddenly you are the center of attention.

Our social referencing homepage investigates why this phenomenon occurs, and what it says about our understanding of others' point of view.

Imagine watching a TV show. How do you think your experience of it would differ if you knew that, across town, your friend was watching it at the same time? We investigated this issue by tracking the gaze of people while they looked at pictures. They were told that a person in the room next door was either looking at the same images as them, or something different. On the joint perception homepage you can see how this minimal social context can change a perceptual process.

Have you ever been sat in a classroom, struggling with an exam, and found that you can remember exactly where on the blackboard the lecturer wrote a vital piece of information, but not what was written? In the Hollywood Squares project we investigate this powerful link between spatial location and information. We found that it is not only students who look systematically at completely blank regions of a screen during a memory task. Surprisingly, six-month-old infants show very similar eye movement patterns. Read more on the project homepage

How does the way in which someone describes a scene alter how you look at it? How are these visual and linguistic processes coordinated, and how do they influence each other? In the first of our implicit spatial language experiments, we examined the effect of figurative language on perception. We compared eye movement patterns when people heard a literal description of a picture, the road is in the desert, with a figurative description the road runs through the desert. You can read about our results and see eye movement recordings on the figurative language homepage

Do you think that respect is a vertical verb or a horizontal verb? How about argue? Most people say that respect is vertical whereas argue is horizontal. In our image schema project we found that people consistently ascribed the same orientation to a wide number of verbs when we asked them to choose or draw simple pictures. Not only that, when people heard a sentence containing the verb respect, for example, it affected their sensitivity and their memory of stimuli appearing in a vertical orientation. We argued that these results are further evidence for perceptual-motor representations of word meaning. Please read all about our experiments in this paper

When you think of a hammer, is it purely a visual image, or do you also imagine picking it up? A variety of experimental results have suggested that the parts of your brain that control action can participate in what were thought to be purely perceptual tasks. We used stimulus-response compatibility experiments to showed that potential motor interactions can be generated by a visual memory of a object, and also from a purely linguistic description. Please download the paper describing these experiments.

Here you can find research reports of current work in progress. These pages are restricted to collaborators and lab members.