Research

Research in the Visual Cognition Lab is focused on understanding human vision during complex real-world scene perception. Because human visual perception involves active information seeking via eye movements, much of the work in the lab focuses on eye movements and human gaze control.

Topics of interest in the lab include fast scene recognition, visual search in natural scenes, visual memory and scene representation, eye movement control during static and dynamic scene viewing, and the integration of visual and linguistic information in natural contexts.

We are also interested in computational approaches to these questions and implementation of underlying processes in the human brain as revealed by neuroimaging techniques such as pupillary response, fMRI and ERP.

News

Research in the Visual Cognition Lab examining the eye movements of viewers during the Obama inauguration was highlighted in newspapers around the UK (including the Scotsman, the Herald, and the Sun), on BBC Scotland television, and on a large number of on-line news sites including BBC and Channel 4 online, MSN, and Yahoo. The story was also summarized on the main university news webpage and in Edit, the University of Edinburgh alumni magazine.

The Psychology Department at Edinburgh University has been ranked 9th in Research Power out of 76 UK psychology departments in the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE).

The first videos are rolling off the line from the CARPE (Computational Algorithms for Representation and Processing of Eye-movements) visualisation and analysis tools of the DIEM (Dynamic Images and Eye Movements) project.

Lab research is funded by grants from the Economic and Social Research Council and the Leverhulme Trust.