Published December 6, 2017

Travelling scientists

With the end of the semester, researchers from the lab are spreading out to collaborate with others around the globe.

Wee Kiat is spending 6 weeks in Paris, France, to work with Thérèse Collins and Mark Wexler on adaptation of eye movements during blinks. Gerrit is visiting the Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute in San Francisco for research collaborations, as well as giving talks about the lab’s research at Google and Oculus Research.

Published August 23, 2017

ECVP in Berlin

The lab is looking forward to the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP) in Berlin, where Aaron and Wee Kiat will present two posters on their projects:

  • Monday 28.8.2017, afternoon session, poster 21:

A potential benefit of eye blinks? Boosted performance in an RSVP task after blinks (and blanks)

Ang, JW, Maus, G

  • Wednesday 30.8., morning session, poster 97:

Multi-modal serial dependence: No effect in audition, but vision survives auditory interference

Lau, WK, Fischer, J, Maus, G

 

During the “Night of Lights” conference party, Christine Veras from ADM will demo her “Silhouette Zoetrope”. We hope to see you in Berlin 😉

Published July 31, 2017

Congrats to Charles, Sam & Wei Hao …

… our 2016/17 Final Year Project students, who just celebrated their graduation!

Published April 20, 2017

New paper on the “Silhouette Zoetrope”

Christine Veras from the School of Art Design and Media created a novel version of a zoetrope, where the moving images are mounted outside a rotating cylinder. Her invention leads to a number of counter-intuitive visual illusions that we investigated in this new paper. Read all about it here in the new issue of iPerception.

View the Silhouette Zoetrope in action:

Published March 1, 2017

New lab member

Yulia Revina has joined our lab as a postdoc.

Yulia received her PhD from the University of Glasgow and will work on fMRI experiments on the mechanisms of filling-in in visual cortex. Welcome Yulia!

Published February 14, 2017

Lab Sharing Session for interested NTU Psychology Undergrads

On Friday, Gerrit presented some research highlights from our lab to a group of interested students. Afterwards, we visited the lab and got some hands-on experience measuring eye movements and blinks with the EyeLink eyetracker. The “Lab Sharing Session” was organized by NTU’s Psychology Society.

Published January 20, 2017

“Blinks recalibrate eye gaze” – Article in Current Biology

Our article on ‘Blink Adaptation’ was published today in Current Biology (or click here for a version without the paywall). When a fixation target is moved during an eye blink, you most likely won’t notice it. Your brain however will notice the change, and adapt its motor command to the eye muscles. On subsequent blinks, your eyes will automatically anticipate the target step. This mechanism recalibrates your eye gaze to ensure stability of gaze direction through an eye blink.

Here’s some news coverage on this publication:

https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2017-01/uoc–wtl011917.php

https://uk.news.yahoo.com/scientists-worked-why-everything-doesn-193919383.html

Published January 12, 2017

New publication on perceptual rivalry in the blind spot

What happens when two objects are filled in in the blind spot, but the resulting percepts contradict each other? As in many other ambiguous situations, you perceive rivalry! This new paper by Mandy Chen, together with Gerrit, David Whitney from Berkeley and Rachel Denison at NYU shows how.

The paper also includes the cool new Jumping Pen Illusion. Try it out for yourself!

The jumping pen illusion, a demonstration of filling-in rivalry. (A) Step 1: Use a strip of paper with a fixation cross and a blind spot indicator (red circle) to find your blind spot. With the cross on the left, close your left eye, fixate the cross, and move the strip toward or away from you until the red circle disappears. (B) Step 2: While keeping the blind spot indicator in your blind spot, take a pen and hold it vertically behind the card. Slide the pen behind the card into your blind spot. The pen may appear to jump in front of the strip. When the pen and strip are held in fixed positions, the pen and strip can alternate as the object seen in front. Anecdotally, increasing the saliency of the pen using motion (e.g. wiggling the pen) or color (e.g. a red pen with a neutral-colored strip) tends to increase the perceptual dominance of the pen.

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The jumping pen illusion, a demonstration of filling-in rivalry. (A) Step 1: Use a strip of paper with a fixation cross and a blind spot indicator (red circle) to find your blind spot. With the cross on the left, close your left eye, fixate the cross, and move the strip toward or away from you until the red circle disappears. (B) Step 2: While keeping the blind spot indicator in your blind spot, take a pen and hold it vertically behind the card. Slide the pen behind the card into your blind spot. The pen may appear to jump in front of the strip. When the pen and strip are held in fixed positions, the pen and strip can alternate as the object seen in front. Anecdotally, increasing the saliency of the pen using motion (e.g. wiggling the pen) or color (e.g. a red pen with a neutral-colored strip) tends to increase the perceptual dominance of the pen.
Published January 3, 2017

Poster presentation at the AVA xmas meeting in London

Lab alumna Hannah presented some of our work on eye blinks and perceiving motion trajectories (with Matteo Lisi from Paris) at the Applied Vision Association xmas meeting in London. Here’s the abstract:

Perceiving Motion Trajectories during Eye Blinks

Hannah Letitia Goh, Matteo Lisi & Gerrit Maus

During an eye blink, visual input is disrupted while objects in motion continue to change in position. How does this temporal occlusion affect our ability to accurately perceive motion and time? We carried out two experiments to investigate perception of motion trajectories at the time of a blink. In Experiment 1, we presented participants with a moving stimulus on a circular trajectory around fixation that disappeared upon detection of a blink, and instructed them to indicate the perceived location of the stimulus at the point of disappearance with a mouse click. In Experiment 2, participants were presented with a similar moving stimulus that jumped either backward or forward by a variable amount during a blink. Participants were instructed to indicate the perceived direction of the jump. In control conditions the stimulus would disappear (Experiment 1) or jump (Experiment 2) while participants’ eyes remained open. In Experiment 1, we observed significantly greater overshoot of motion on blink trials, with the last perceived stimulus position shifted forward by a constant distance into the period of occlusion during the blink. In Experiment 2, participants perceived a backward jump that occurred during a blink as continuous, consistent with the notion that time during a blink was perceived as ~60-100 ms shorter than in actuality. These results suggest eye blinks are partially filled in with extrapolated trajectory information, and that elapsed time during a blink is perceptually compressed (Duyck et al., 2015, J Vision 15, 370; Irwin & Robinson, 2016, J Exp Psy Hum Perc Perf 42, 1490-6).