A Rewarding Summer of Eye movement Research

Reward and risk on blue road sign with blue sky The Lincoln Eyelink Lab (a.k.a. Lab E1) promises to be a busy place this summer. Undergraduate Research Opportunities Scheme (UROS) students Daniel Richardson and Jade Pickering will be working in the lab between July and August alongside two eye movement researchers from Turkey.

 Daniel Richardson is examining the “neuroeconomics” of reward and eye movements. Together we are developing a task in which participants learn mappings between target stimuli and points rewards. We are interested in whether the learned reward value of stimuli might subtley modify the kinematics (speed and accuracy) of eye movements made towards them.

 Jade Pickering will be assisting with  my investigations of oculomotor and cognitive studies in people with Parkinsons later in the summer as well as collecting some pilot data for the GPSAC project using the Ober saccadometer device.

PhD research student Murat Ozger will be continuing to develop his work on visual attention and eye movements in Crime Scene Investigation settings (see YouTube video).eye

We are also joined by visiting researcher Aycem Ozturk (Dokus Eylul University, Izmir, Turkey) who is in the UK to learn about the Eyelink 1000 system and to further develop her research into oculomotor function in Parkinsons and dementia.

It is exciting for me to be working in such a busy team of researchers this year and I am sure it will be a rewarding summer!