If attention were a muscle, most of us would swear ours had been skipping leg day. One minute you’re reading an email, the next you’re three tabs deep into a recipe for a croquembouche that looks like a “Kraken bush”—and you don’t remember how you got there. Psychologists call the ability to stay on task […]
Scientific Practice
One of the greatest (and, in my opinion, most overlooked) aspects of science is that it is a process inherently founded on and driven by community. Almost all ongoing research questions are derived from prior research, and the outputs of ongoing research will inevitably inspire new lines of work and discovery. Scientific discoveries are ultimately […]
The bard, William Shakespeare, was a lover of symbolic imagery and flowers and often used flowers to convey meaning between characters and to the audience. Take Romeo & Juliet, for example. Shakespeare uses the imagery of roses (such as represented below) to represent Juliet’s passionate love for Romeo and to emphasize that their love is […]
There’s a mean (not really) but funny (maybe only to me) trick I like to play on my students that starts with a lesson on an experiment. It works for almost any kind of cognitive psychology study, and I start it by walking my students through the design of an experiment—the research question, important variables, […]
There are some who might scoff at it, but I’m always a bit charmed to meet someone who puts their fingers and thumbs in the classic “L” and “reversed L” formations to differentiate between left and right. And although I usually don’t need to do this, it seems to be a relatable enough experience to at […]
Eye tracking has evolved into a critical tool across multiple disciplines, from psychology and cognitive science to diagnostics and usability research. The recent Fundamentals of Eye Tracking series, published in Behavior Research Methods, provides a comprehensive guide to understanding, selecting, and implementing eye-tracking technology effectively. In our previous blog posts, experts in the field reflect […]
This morning, my students told me: “We expected problems in our eye-tracking research, but not ones that made our study impossible.” There’s nothing like the frustration that comes when a tool doesn’t work in the way you hoped. Those students are in the first semester of a two-year research master program that develops their research […]
Eye tracking technology is widely used in psychology, human factors, and usability research, but its role in ophthalmology and neurology is equally promising. In reading ‘The Fundamentals of Eye Tracking Part 3: How to Choose an Eye Tracker 1, we were inspired by its insights and saw an opportunity to extend the discussion into medical […]
I am a reading researcher, and I started out my career in eye-tracking in the Autumn of 1999 on a cloudy day. I do not actually remember the weather that day, but it was in Belgium, so cloudy is a pretty solid guess. I had just started my internship in the final year of my […]
Last week, I was in Montreal, Canada, looking to check into a hotel. A colleague was with me, using a map on his phone to navigate. He turned one way, then another, trying to determine the right direction. Meanwhile, I lifted my head, looked around, and immediately spotted the hotel sign glowing brightly down the […]