Eye-tracking

This Radiology internship investigates expertise in screening mammography through simulation, eye tracking and psychometric testing, with additional AI projects in breast imaging. Work includes participant recruitment and testing, management and analysis of de-identified data, and scientific writing. The appointment requires at least one year and is on site. Apply to lsalkowski@uwhealth.org with a CV or résumé, cover letter, university transcripts and two references.

Study how people choose where and when to look and how visual information guides walking and arm movements. Projects use mobile eye tracking, motion capture, virtual reality and potentially natural environments. This position pays CAD 60,000 annually plus benefits for one year, with possible second and third years depending on performance and funding. Start any time after September 1, 2026; recruitment remains open until filled. A related PhD, programming and statistical skills, and lead-author research publications are required; computational modelling and computer vision experience are usefu

We actively sample our visual environment via gaze shifts, primarily involving eye and head movements. While there has been extensive research on human eye movements, this is not the case for head movements, which remain severely underexplored, both in terms of their behavioral characteristics and underlying electrophysiology. Here, we report data from multiple experiments where human participants performed gaze shifts that included real-world head and eye movements. Head and eye tracking data were recorded simultaneously with scalp EEG in healthy participants and intracranial EEG in epilepsy

Pavlovian conditioning describes a form of associative learning wherein initially neutral cues acquire motivational value through repeated pairing with rewards. Two learning profiles have been identified in how such cues acquire value and bias performance: sign-trackers, i.e., individuals who attribute high incentive (or attractive) value to reward-predictive cues, and goal-trackers, i.e., individuals who acquire the predictive value of cues but use it to directly approach the reward. The acquisition of incentive value seems crucial in making sign-trackers maladaptive, favouring behaviours lik

To perform advanced behaviors employing vision, mechanisms are necessary to stabilize the scene on the retina, including the optokinetic reflex, mediated by the pretectum (PT). Additionally, this stabilizing responses are modified to redirect our eyes to specific targets playing a key role the optic tectum (OT). Here, we investigated the role of PT and OT in processing optokinetic and non-optokinetic stimuli in the lamprey; an accessible animal model that enables ex-vivo preparations maintaining sensory organs. Moreover, the unique stepwise development of their visual system allows to study th

How do humans make decisions? Some theories propose that a prospective brain allows us to predict future events, enabling us to simulate the consequences of our actions and progress toward our goals. Despite increased emphasis on gaze-driven evidence accumulation models, existing decision models underestimate or neglect the significance of mental imagery in decision-making. We aim to explore how gaze behavior and visual imagery interact, simulating mental states associated with potential outcomes during deliberation. Previous research has suggested the 'looking-at-nothing' phenomenon, a behavi

Hostility biases and ingrained cognitive predispositions, influence how individuals perceive and interpret social cues, often imbuing interactions with negative connotations. These biases can lead people to interpret harmless actions as threatening or hostile, fostering a climate of suspicion and discord in social interactions. There exist numerous methodologies dedicated to the examination and analysis of this particular behavioral phenomenon, which is why this research was conducted. This study is a battery of assessments of psychological methods formulated to measure an individual's tendenc

Investigating vision through naturalistic stimuli holds great promise, because the visual system of any animal species is adapted to its ecological niche. In mice, such adaptations include a field of view exceeding 300° and cone opsins sensitive to UV and green light. These adaptations, however, cannot be probed with standard consumer displays.To present naturalistic stimuli with respect to coverage, color, and content to mice, we built a hemispheric dome setup, enabling the controlled projection of wide-field movies with UV-green spectral content. For our UV-green projection, we used a custom

The developmental origins of fear and its variations in individuals are poorly understood. Evidence suggests an attentional bias towards fearful faces emerges around 5-7 months of age. Our prior findings in 8-month-old infants indicate that neonatal left amygdala volumes were positively associated with attention disengagement probability from fearful faces. To our knowledge, this is the first study exploring the underlying white matter tracts. We used neonatal diffusion tensor imaging (DTI) data and eye tracking using an overlap paradigm with faces and non-faces as a behavioural measure collec

Individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) present with core deficits in social interaction and communication. The goal of the current study is to decipher the neural mechanisms underlying impaired speech and language processing in autism. Using a linear neural encoding framework, we analyzed the temporal response function (TRF) to continuous audiovisual speech stimulation at different levels of the speech processing hierarchy, ranging from acoustic to phonetic, to understand the stages at which information processing breaks down in individuals with ASD. We recorded high-density electroph

Schemas are known to facilitate learning and memory consolidation in humans and rodents. However, their role in decision making is not well understood and the effects of task factors like risk, novelty, prior knowledge, arousal and attention are under-explored. We designed a new computer-based experiment where participants could firstly explore a list of different author’s paintings or quotes and then select items with the same authorship. Most participants showed improvement in performance, yet factors, including previous progress, risk and novelty conditions, pupil diameter and heart rate, p

Working memory is inherently limited in capacity and duration, which may hamper learning, including in online learning environments. Because working memory capacity varies among individuals, cognitive load in online learning may not have the same impact for neurotypical and neurodivergent students. This study investigated the relationship between neurodivergent traits and cognitive load during online learning. Seventy participants, including 35 neurotypical students and 35 neurodivergent students with a diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), autism spectrum disorder (ASD

…We hypothesised these non-invasive eye-tracking signals will predict verbal memory performance in patients with drug-resistant epilepsy.Twenty-nine patients completed simple eye-tracking tasks, probing Smooth Pursuit (SP) and Anti-Pro-Saccade (AP) gaze movements, and were groupe

…In a psychophysics and eye-tracking experiment, 63 participants reported filling-in while attending peripherally to a grey rectangle on a dynamic texture field. We varied the orientation of elements in the

Cue reactivity is an important predictor of addiction and relapse. However, it is unclear to what degree it is determined by a trait-like propensity to attribute incentive salience to cues. Animal studies have uncovered that individual variation in such a trait-like propensity expressed behaviorally as “sign-tracking” (ST) is associated with addiction-relevant behavioral and neurobiological features. The current study is first to examine the association between ST and cue reactivity in regular electronic cigarette (ECIG) users. Thirty-seven moderately dependent ECIG users (20 females) were cha

Attentional preference for social stimuli, such as different facial expressions, is an important part of the development of humans' behavioral and emotional health. Infants demonstrate a predilection for faces and tend to sustain visual attention over non-social stimuli immediately after birth and throughout infancy. Infants begin to identify facial expressions and emotions around the age of 6 to 8 months. Studies have shown that the amygdala plays an important role in infants' attentional bias towards faces and fear processing. The goal of this study was to examine how infants’ amygdala mean

The priority maps framework proposes that attentional priorities are weighted in cognitive/brain maps of the external space. As extensions of saliency maps, a variety of factors known as “attentional signals” would be represented in these so-called priority maps, ranging from low-level features such as physical salience to higher-level features such as social information. According to studies investigating attentional patterns in the presence of social signals, social attentional signals (e.g. faces) would “automatically” overcome the presence of any other signal and win the competition for at

Eye movements are known to be driven by stimulus features (e.g., saliency). However, spatiotemporal dynamics of eye movements are remarkably stable within an individual. In a previous study, we recorded eye movements from 120 participants in a free-viewing task. Three principal components explained 60% of the variance of the data. The first principal component (PC1) loaded on fixation duration, and subjects could be clustered in two different visual exploration phenotypes: “static” and “dynamic” viewers. In a second EEG resting-state study on the same sample, carried out one year later, static

How central were psychological features deriving from our visual systems to the early evolution of human visual culture? Art making emerged deep in our evolutionary history, with the earliest art appearing over 100,000 years ago as geometric patterns etched on fragments of ochre and shell, and figurative representations of prey animals flourishing in the Upper Palaeolithic (c. 40,000 – 15,000 years ago). The latter reflects a complex visual process; the ability to represent something that exists in the real world as a flat, two-dimensional image. In this presentation, I argue that pareidolia –

In our daily lives, we perceive things as possessing a mind (e.g., people) or lacking one (e.g., shoes). Intriguingly, how much mind we attribute to people can vary, with real people perceived to have more mind than depictions of individuals, such as photographs. Drawing from a range of research methodologies, including naturalistic observation, mobile eye tracking, and surreptitious behavior monitoring, I discuss how various shades of mind influence human attention and behaviour. The findings suggest the novel concept that overt attention (where one looks) in real-life is fundamentally suppor

The eyes are a window into the mind. Eye-tracking studies in the psychology literature report large individual differences in how people deploy attention when scanning photographs of real-world environments. Yet, a key question remains unanswered. Are the eyes a window into a specific mind? In other words, are individual differences in gaze allocation unique to a person and stable within that person? If so, what representational space structures these individual “attentional fingerprints”? Here, we developed a novel approach for describing abstract semantic information present in real-world s

…early verb learning that make use of eye-tracking procedures as well as other behavioral (pointing) procedures, and that test key predictions from SA theory including the prediction that seeing similar examples before more varied examp

…present key results from a series of eye-tracking experiments in which observers had to search for a target object within static or dynamic images of real-world scenes. Gaze-contingent scotomas were used to selectively deny information processing in the fovea, parafovea, or periphery. Overall, the results suggest that foveal vision is less imp

It is well established that the opportunity to compare learning stimuli in a novel word learning/extension task elicits a larger number of conceptually relevant generalizations than standard no-comparison conditions. I will present results suggesting that the effectiveness of comparison depends on factors such as semantic distance, number of training items, dimension distinctiveness and interactions with age. I will address these issues in the case of familiar and unfamiliar object nouns and relational nouns. The alignment strategies followed by children during learning and at test (i.e., when