This award to Drs. Stephani Foraker, Jill Norvilitis and Pamela Schuetze-Pizarro will permit the Psychology Department at Buffalo State College, SUNY, (BSC) to purchase an Eyelink 1000 eye-tracker to improve and extend its ability to produce programmatic research and increase the research training opportunities for undergraduate students. The instrument tracks a participant's eye movements, providing several dependent measures of precise millisecond timing and fine-grained location resolution that index attentional and cognitive processes. The requested tracker has several flexible and powerful software features as well as equipment configurations, supporting the varied and wide-ranging needs of the faculty and students who will use the tracker.
Drs. Foraker, Schuetze, and Norvilitis will be the major users of the acquired instrument, to significantly extend the depth and breadth of their existing research programs. Three innovative projects will investigate different aspects of attentional mechanisms. One project will use eye-tracking measures to study working memory and attention processes underlying language comprehension. Dr. Foraker will also investigate the novel issue of whether comprehension of multi-modal language (as in face-to-face communication) involves overt or covert attention to hand gestures, as well as examine the time course of integrating gestured and spoken content. A second project will investigate the development of attention and self-regulation functions in cigarette-exposed children. Such children show atypical reactivity as infants, but whether and how prenatal cigarette exposure affects attention and self-regulation in preschoolers is currently unknown. A series of tasks testing different components of attentional control will compare this at-risk population with controls in a longitudinal design. The third project will examine the left visual field neglect typically found in ADHD children and adults. Dr. Norvilitis will test two explanations of why the neglect occurs, and related accounts for reading difficulties will be investigated.
Research using the eye-tracker will provide results of theoretical importance and educational and societal impact. The studies will increase understanding of written and multi-modal communication, the developmental repercussions of prenatal cigarette exposure on preschoolers' attention skills, and effective ways to assess and ameliorate reading difficulties in children and adults with ADHD. The eye-tracker will provide high-impact research opportunities for undergraduates, incorporating individualized teaching and training of students using a leading-edge and major methodology. As an urban college in upstate New York, our students are racially, ethnically, and socially diverse, and the Psychology Department successfully prepares students from underrepresented populations and economically disadvantaged backgrounds for promising graduate careers in scientific psychological research. The eye-tracker will also be incorporated in laboratory courses and class demonstrations, increasing research interest and exposure for undergraduates in their early years.
We successfully purchased and installed the requested major research instrument, the SR Research Eyelink 1000 eye-tracker, following renovations to the dedicated space in the Psychology Department at Buffalo State College, SUNY. The instrument tracks a participant’s eye movements, providing several dependent measures of precise millisecond timing and fine-grained location resolution that index attentional and cognitive processes. This instrument is directly benefitting the development and impact of the co-PIs’ research programs in cognitive and developmental psychology. Experiments currently underway aim to increase our understanding of written and multi-modal communication, and future studies are designed to increase our understanding of the developmental repercussions of prenatal cigarette exposure on preschoolers’ attention skills, and effective ways to assess and ameliorate reading difficulties in children and adults with ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder). The instrument is already contributing to the high-impact research opportunities we offer undergraduate students, focusing on individualized research mentoring. The key faculty personnel at Buffalo State College have been trained in the eye-tracker’s use. To date, one undergraduate student is involved in ongoing language comprehension research, addressing how memory and attention processes affect how we understand what a pronoun means (for example, how do we figure out who "he" is given the sentences "Craig took a trip to Hawaii while Matt took a trip to Florida. He thought the weather was great."). In addition, three graduate students from another metro-area university have been trained on how to use the eye-tracker and one is presently collaborating with the PI on a series of experiments investigating how words with ambiguous meanings are represented and processed (e.g., "ball" can mean a spherical object like a soccer ball, or it can mean a social dance gathering). Preliminary User Guide materials have been developed for training students and faculty researchers in the eye-tracker’s use, from programming to data analysis, and will be updated as new protocols and applications are developed. Educational applications are focused on undergraduate student research studies with close individual supervision and mentoring.
