Eyelander at CVRS London 2023

Last week I attended the 18th Biennial Child Vision Research Society meeting at UCL Great Ormond Street Institute of Child Health. The meeting included a symposium in honour of the late Oliver Braddick, co-founder of the UCL/Oxford Visual Development Unit together with Janette Atkinson who gave an impressive overview of the unit’s pioneering work on infant vision over the decades as part of the session.

Amongst the many other highlights of the meeting, Cathy Williams (University of Bristol), presented evidence for sub-types of Cerebral Visual Impairment (CVI) in children. It has become apparent recently that a surprisingly high proportion of children in main stream classrooms may have such brain based visual problems.

My own talk about the Eyelander game was the last presentation of the conference! But everyone stayed right to the end and seemed to really enjoy it! Eyelander is a gamified version of compensatory visual search training for children with loss of vision on one side (hemianopia) . Selective loss of vision to the left or right might occur following brain injury or neurosurgery, but may also be found in many children with CVI (see above).

I really enjoyed the CVRS meeting. It was great to meet so many new people. In fact, it was one of the friendliest and most enjoyable meetings I’ve ever been to, so I will be sure to go again in 2 years time!

Eyelander game at VIEW conference

Recently I attended the VIEW conference for Visual impairment (VI) specialist teachers and professionals in Birmingham, to raise awareness of our Eyelander online game for children with partial visual field loss (Hemianopia).

Eyelander is based on visual search training programmes that have been shown to be effective in improving functional visual abilities in adults that suffer from Homonymous visual field loss following stroke. In the game you have to search for coloured shapes amongst “distractor” shapes, with varying levels of task difficult as the game progresses. As you complete more searches your character (the “Eyelander”) make progress in escaping a volcanic desert island.

The game is available to play via a web browser, either on a computer with a mouse / laptop or a touch screen device. Its efficacy was validated via a published small scale trial in a group of children and young people with well defined hemianopia, suggesting playing the game every day over a period of 4 to 6 weeks can lead to improved visual abilities.

There was lots of interest in the game from VI teachers, who feel that partial visual field loss and problems seeing on one side is very common in the children they work with. Estimates for number of children with some form of brain based visual impairment (also known as Cerebral Visual Impairment or CVI) and many of these may have visual field problems. Given this we are keen for more parents, children, teachers and others working with children with VI to know about Eyelander and to give it a go.

So visit www.eyelander.co.uk and register to play!

26th British Oculomotor Group Meeting

bomgThis week I will be presenting at the 26th British Oculomotor group in Cardiff.

I’m pleased to be attending this meeting and catching up with recent research from colleagues especially as I used to help organise this meeting many years ago when it was hosted at Charing Cross hospital London.

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Screen Shot of Spatial Working Memory Task

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Eye gaze directional cue

This year I will be presenting recent work examining how people use eye movements to perform a test of Spatial Working Memory (Based on the widely used CANTAB  Spatial Working Memory task) and differences in this between healthy people and people with Parkinsons Disease.

Dr Frouke Hermens from the School of Psychology will also be presenting her work at the meeting on real world eye tracking studies of the effect of social attentional cues.

Award for Journal of Neuroscience Psychology and Economics paper

Our 2012 fMRI “Neuro-economics” study of a Coordination / Temptation game scenario, carried out in collaboration with Milan based social philosopher Francesco Guala has been given an award as one of the Top 10 all time classic papers published in the APA publication JNPE. I am looking forward to traveling to Munich to accept the award at the NeuroPsychoEconomics conference at Ludwig-Maximillian University at the end of May.

Abstract of paper

More about the conference 

Psychology News Blog 

And previous posts

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