Research project: Eye movements in special populations

Currently Active:: Yes

In everyday life the default strategy to sample the visual environment is to move our eyes in fast ballistic movements (saccades) interspersed with periods where the eye remains still (fixations). This is known as saccadic orienting, and its purpose is to re-position the high acuity area of the retina, the fovea, so that detailed inspection can be carried out at the point of fixation. This work investigates eye movements in 'normal' and 'special' participants in an aim to understand how intact, and defective saccadic orienting impacts upon the ability to sample and perceive the 'world'.

Project Overview

Patterns of saccades and fixations can reflect which features of a display drive the sequence of eye movements for a given task, i.e. visual search tasks, reading, scene perception. Analysis of eye movements allows us to learn about the influence of different types of visual stimuli, on visual and cognitive processing in normal and special populations. The following topics are currently being investigated by our group:

Eye Movements for simple and complex information processing in Asperger’s Syndrome Disorder.
Eye movements and repetitive interests in children with Autism.
Eye movements and biases in threat detection for anxious individuals.
Eye Movements and perceptual awareness in Visual Neglect.
Eye movements and ERPs for face perception in Prosopagnosia.
Eye movements and inhibition in ageing populations.

Related research groups

Publications

Articles

Kuhn, G., Benson, V., Fletcher-Watson, S., Kovshoff, H., McCormick, C. A., Kirkby, J., & Leekam, S. R. (2010). Eye movements affirm: automatic overt gaze and arrow cueing for typical adults and adults with autism spectrum disorder. Experimental Brain Research, 201(2), 155-165. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00221-009-2019-7
Benson, V., Piper, J., & Fletcher-Watson, S. (2009). Atypical saccadic scanning in autistic spectrum disorder. Neuropsychologia, 47(4), 1178-1182. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.11.019
Fletcher-Watson, S., Leekam, S., Benson, V., Frank, M. C., & Findlay, J. M. (2009). Eye-movements reveal attention to social information in autism spectrum disorder. Neuropsychologia, 47(1), 248-257. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuropsychologia.2008.07.016
Fletcher-Watson, S., Findlay, J. M., Leekam, S., & Benson, V. (2008). Rapid detection of person information in a naturalistic scene. Perception, 37(4), 571-583. https://doi.org/10.1068/p5705
Khun, G., & Benson, V. (2007). The influence of eye-gaze and arrow pointing distractors cues on voluntary eye movements. Perception and Psychophysics, 69(6), 966-971.

Staff

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