Invited speakers

Daniel Richardson

A look inside the human body: the role of eye movements in medical imaging research
Alistair Gale, Loughborough University, UK
In 1895 Roentgen discovered the X-ray and produced the first X-ray image of his wife’s hand. Fast forward 118 years to today and hospital medical imaging departments are awash with a multitude of different imaging techniques to produce appropriate insight into the innards of the human body. For many years X-ray images were produced as greyscale images on X-ray film which had to be viewed on illuminated light boxes in darkened radiological reporting rooms. Such film-based technology has now almost everywhere been replaced by digital imaging where images are captured and displayed digitally often using multiple very high resolution monitors. Interpreting the resultant images appropriately is in many ways an imperfect science and unfortunately errors have been, and are, made - often running at a rate of 20-30%. For the past 50 years many of these errors have been recognised as being due to failures of ‘perception’ (being taken in its most general sense) and a mass of international research has investigated many aspects of medical imaging with the aim of minimising error. Such research will be reviewed, together with current on-going work, and the problems of conducting meaningful real-world research in the domain today will be highlighted.

Susanna Martinez-Conde

Computer control by gaze
Kari-Jouko Räihä, University of Tampere
Eye gaze has for a long time been used as an input channel for computer software. Early interest was directed at enabling the use of computers for users with disabilities that prevented other forms of communication. Later, applications that adapt their behavior based on the knowledge of the user's point of gaze, and interaction techniques specifically developed for gaze input, have attracted increasing attention. Recent emergence of low-cost trackers and mobile eye tracking technology, both in mobile handsets and in head-mounted glasses, has further accelerated the exploration of the possibilities offered by eye gaze as a computer input modality. I will review the work that has been done to make eye gaze a natural and enabling technique for interacting with computers.

The cycle of social signaling
Alan Kingstone, University of British Columbia
Social attention research is surprisingly anti-social. In the lab, research participants are routinely isolated and tested with simple social images that serve as proxies for real people. I will present recent work demonstrating that human social attention changes dramatically “in the wild” where people are in the presence of other real people. I suggest that a crucial difference between social attention "in the lab" and social attention "in the wild" is that, in the wild, individuals are faced with at least two, possibly competing, goals: (1) to attend to the social signals of other people, and (2) in doing so, broadcast social signals to others. Appreciating that this cycle of social signaling operates in the wild but rarely in the lab, is an important step towards gaining a broader understanding of human social attention.

The Geometry of Eye Gaze Tracking
Carlos Morimoto, University of São Paulo
Video based eye gaze tracking has become the dominant technique over EEG and magnetic coil based systems, because it offers better accuracy than EEG, and it is easier to setup and use than coils. Despite many recent advancements, video based gaze trackers remain difficult to use due to calibration issues in particular. A poor calibration will make the data useless but even a good calibration tend to drift over time. Understanding the geometric models used in each solution might help us to build better gaze trackers and might also help users to avoid poor situations where calibration is most likely to fail. I will review some geometrical models used in video based techniques, explain their limitations, and also describe a few recent solutions towards a single, one time calibration per eye.

Rethinking theoretical frameworks: Studies of eye movements during non-alphabetic reading and reading development.
Simon P. Liversedge, University of Southampton
In cognitive psychology there has been a significant amount of eye movement research to investigate the psychological processes underlying normal reading. The vast majority of this work has focused on skilled adult reading of alphabetic languages (predominantly English). However, recently, two areas have received an increasing amount of attention; reading in non-alphabetic languages, and the study of reading development. The main claim that I will make in this talk is that consideration of experimental findings from studies in these areas pushes us to think somewhat differently about the theoretical questions we pursue in our work. To make this claim, I will discuss data from a number of relevant experiments that colleagues and I have carried out, focusing on key theoretical issues that have emerged from the work. I will also try to consider the implications of these findings for existing accounts of eye movement control in reading.

Douglas Munoz
Thomas Haslwanter