Maiko and Egor have joined the lab this month.
Maiko Uesaki arrived here from Kyoto and will be working on MRI studies of visual areas in the intraparietal sulcus. Egor Ananyev recently finished his PhD at NUS and will be studying interactions between eye blinks and visual attention.
Welcome!
Gerrit answered some questions from the new journal Communications Biology of the Nature family. Read the full interview here: https://doi.org/10.1038/s42003-018-0130-7
Gerrit and Wee Kiat are presenting recent results from our lab at the European Conference on Visual Perception in Trieste, Italy.
Wee Kiat is showing results from our collaboration with the Laboratoire Psychologie de la Perception on Paris on how eye blinks and saccades interact to correct for gaze stability errors:
“Gaze position changes across blinks carry over to saccade landing errors”
Wee Kiat Lau, Thérèse Collins, Gerrit Maus
Gerrit will summarize some of the work going on in our lab during a symposium dedicated to “What are eye blinks good for? Perceptual, oculomotor, and cognitive effects of eye blinks“.
More information can also be found in these two manuscripts that we have just released on PsyArXiv:
Directional biases for blink adaptation in voluntary and reflexive eye blinks
Wee Kiat Lau & Gerrit Maus
Boosted visual performance after eye blinks
Jit Wei A. Ang & Gerrit Maus
After two busy weeks of helping to host and attending several local conferences (PRNI, BrainSTIM, OHBM, NBIA), we took a half day off to attempt an escape from the Mausoleum (we managed… with bare seconds to spare).
Welcome to Arnab Biswas, who joined our lab this week as Lab Manager and Research Assistant. He will be taking care of our equipment and the new lab, and embark on his own research projects soon.
The lab just finished a successful visit to the Vision Science Meeting in Florida. Aaron, Wee Kiat and Yulia all presented their latest research findings as posters, and Christine Veras (now at University of Texas at Dallas) showed her “Silhouette Zoetrope” at the Demo Night.
A potential benefit of eye blinks? Performance in RSVP tasks after blinks (and blanks)
Jit Wei (Aaron) Ang, Gerrit Maus
Anisotropic gaze adaptation in reflexive and voluntary blinks
Wee Kiat Lau, Gerrit W Maus
Comparing filling-in of spatiotemporal patterns in the blind spot, under occlusion, and across artificial scotomata
Yulia Revina, Gerrit Maus
This week an eminent vision scientist from Germany will visit our lab at NTU. Lothar Spillmann from the University of Freiburg is the discoverer of the watercolour illusion, the co-founder of the European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP), and has made numerous contributions to the field of Gestalt Psychology, visual perception, and neurophysiology of the visual system.
Lothar will present a CLASS Distinguished Lecture on Tuesday, April 24th at 3 pm in the HSS Conference Room (see details below). All welcome! (Please register here)
In “Illusory occlusion affects stereoscopic depth perception”, published today in Scientific Reports, we show that filled-in percepts in the blind spot can influence our perception of depth of other objects. When two bars cross in the blind spot–one that is filled in and one that is visible to both eyes with an actual disparity signal that should determine its perceived depth–the filled in bar can nevertheless perceived to be in front and also “push” the other bar to be seen further away. This finding tells us more about filling-in processes occuring in visual cortex and how they can influence other perceptual processes.
Congrats to Mandy Chen from UC Berkeley, who worked on this study together with Rachel Denison (now at NYU), David Whitney, and Gerrit Maus (at NTU Singapore).
Congratulations to Aaron, for winning a student travel award from the Vision Sciences Society to attend the Annual Meeting in Florida in May! Watch this space for more information on our presentations at VSS this year.
https://www.visionsciences.org/2018-travel-awards/
Professor Thérèse Collins is visiting our lab from Paris to continue our collaborations on eye blinks and saccades. She is also presenting a talk on her fascinating research on Wednesday. Please join us, if you can!
