Professor Mary M Hayhoe
Center for Perceptual Systems, University of Texas Austin
The goal of my research is to understand vision in the context of natural behavior. This is of fundamental importance because relatively little is known about vision in the natural world, and many important issues arise in natural behavior that are absent, or difficult to address, in standard paradigms. A central feature of natural vision is that information is dynamically acquired from the environment to guide ongoing actions and behavioral goals. Information from a scene is actively sampled by a sequence of gaze changes as a consequence of the limited acuity of the peripheral retina. In addition, attention limits the information that can be processed within a single fixation, and working memory limits the information retained across gaze positions. Thus to understand vision we need to understand how is this sampling process controlled, and what factors involved in the acquisition of visual information in the context of these constraints.
Professor Reinhold Kliegl
Department of Psychology, University of Potsdam
Reinhold Kliegl is professor of experimental psychology at the University of Potsdam, Germany. His research focuses on how the dynamics of language-related, perceptual, and oculomotor processes subserve attentional control, using reading, spatial attention, and working memory tasks as experimental venues; he also examines neural correlates and age-related differences in these processes. His research has been carried out in interdisciplinary projects with colleagues from linguistics as well as from theoretical physics and mathematics. He is a member of the senate of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, a member of the Editorial Board of Psychological Review, and a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences. In 2002 he received the Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz Prize of Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and in 2008 the Wilhelm-Wundt-Medaille of Deutsche Gesellschaft für Psychologie.
Professor Eyal Reingold
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto
Current Research Interests and Projects
- Unconscious perception, memory, and learning.
- The use of eye movements to study expertise in reading and chess.
- Eye movements and visual attention, with special emphasis on visual search tasks.
- The saccadic system with special interest in the saccadic inhibition phenomenon.
- The use of eye movements to study memory encoding and retrieval.
- Applied eye movements research:
- gaze control: The use of eye movements as a human/computer interface modality.
- gaze contingent, variable resolution displays.
- eye movement measurement techniques and instruments.
More information is available at: http://www.psych.utoronto.ca/users/reingold/
Dr Robert H. Wurtz
Laboratory of Sensoimotor Research, National Eye Institute, NIH
Dr. Wurtz received his A.B. from Oberlin College and his Ph.D. from the University of Michigan where he worked in the laboratory of James Olds on intra-cranial self-stimulation. He did postdoctoral research at the Department of Physiology, Washington University, on slow potential changes in cerebral cortex and in NINDS on synaptic plasticity in aplysia. In 1966 he joined the Laboratory of Neurobiology, NIMH and began studies on the visual system of awake, behaving monkeys. During this time he spent a year as a Visiting Scientist at the Physiological Laboratory at Cambridge University in England. He became the founding Chief of the Laboratory of Sensorimotor Research, NEI in 1978 and continues to work in this laboratory as an NIH Distinguished Scientist and Chief of the Section on Visuomotor Integration.
Dr. Wurtz was elected to the National Academy of Sciences in 1988, the American Academy of Arts & Sciences in 1990, and the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences in 1997. He was President of the Society for Neuroscience in 1990 -91.
His awards include the W. Alden Spencer Award, Columbia University (1987), the Friedenwald Award of the Association for Research in Vision and Ophthalmology (1996), the Karl Spencer Lashley Prize of the American Philosophical Society (1997), the distinguished scientific contribution award of the American Psychological Association (1997), the Dan David Prize for the Future Time Dimension: "Brain Sciences" (2004), and the Ralph W. Gerard Prize of the Society for Neuroscience (2006).
Dr Wurtz's work is centered on the visual and oculomotor system of the primate brain that controls the generation of rapid or saccadic eye movements, and the use of the monkey as a model of human visual perception and the control of movement. His recent work has concentrated on the inputs to the cerebral cortex that underlie visual attention and the stability of visual perception.
