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