Research
Overview of our current research projects:
Reading is a complex skill that provides a rich domain for studying language, attention, vision and memory. By studying reading, our lab aims to understand how visual expertise develops, individual differences, the link between eye movements and on-going cognitive processing (i.e., the eye-mind link), and a variety of related phenomena (e.g., lexical ambiguity resolution, re-reading, and cross-language differences).
To understand the time course of the cognitive, perceptual and neural processes that support reading, our lab combines wide range of tasks and methodologies (e.g., eye tracking, distributional analyses, computational modeling, ERP/EEG).
In addition to studying text reading, our lab is also interested in reading in a variety of other ecologically valid contexts (music reading, reading medical text and images, and reading with emojis). For example, we are currently monitoring the eye movements of expert and novice musicians during music reading to test and develop theories about how expertise develops as well as the structure of experts' memory representations.
More broadly, we are also interested in other domains of visual expertise beyond reading (e.g., chess expertise), as well as visual search, attention, learning, memory, and the conscious/unconscious distinction.
Lab facilities:
We have several eye tracking testing rooms available in the lab in SS 254, in addition to offices for PhD students and postdocs, a conference room, and a sink and storage area for the lab's EEG equipment. Our lab has the facilities to combine eye tracking and EEG (i.e., co-registration). Our lab equipment includes the SR Research Eyelink Portable Duo (which can be used for remote data collection), the Eyelink 1000 Plus eye tracker, a 64-channel EEG system from Brain Products (the actiCHamp system), Mac and Dell computer setups, and a variety of button boxes for collecting reaction time data. The lab primarily uses R to analyze our data, and we also have a variety of software licenses available to support the lab's eye tracking and EEG research (e.g., MATLAB, Experiment Builder and Data Viewer from SR Research, BrainVision Analyzer).
For further details about computing resources on campus, see the link below: