Lewis Chuang, Ph.D.
Project Leader
Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics, Tübingen, Germany
Beyond a fixation on fixations: What can we learn from eye-movement behaviour?
Abstract: Eye-tracking technology enables us to record eye-movements. For many, this offers the opportunity to estimate what an observed user is looking at, and how long for. In other words, periods when the eye is not moving. In my talk, I will explain how properties and patterns of eye-movements can reveal aspects of the observed individual's cognitive state. More specifically, I will draw on the results of human behaviour studies from my lab to explain how saccade reaction times, saccadic sequences, and dwell-transitions can discriminate for one's goals, scene complexity, and capacity for executive planning. These studies were conducted across the domains of eye-movement coordination, natural scene description, and executive functions for flight control. In doing so, I will explain how we applied relevant cognitive models to guide our analyses of eye-movement behavior. To summarize, this talk will demonstrate that eye-movements reflect the executive planning and decision-making processes that underlie one's motivation and capacity to perform a task effectively.
About the speaker: Lewis Chuang leads research on "Cognition and Control in Human-Machine Systems" at the Max Planck Institute for Biological Cybernetics (http://www.kyb.tuebingen.mpg.de/nc/employee/details/chuang.html). By employing gaze-tracking and EEG/ERP methods, he investigates how humans seek out and process information in order to support their interactions with machines in closed-loop systems. Lewis Chuang received his PhD in Behavioural Neuroscience from the University of Tübingen, Germany. He has been supported by European and German research funding, including MyCopter (www.mycopter.eu). He is a principal investigator in a transregional research center for visual computing (www.trr161.de) where he is responsible for the work-package titled "Immersive Virtual Environments".
