Our paper investigating the impact of satnavs on driving has just been published online here. We are very excited about the amount of interest it has generated! More details coming soon.
Author: Polly Dalton
A new direction
Sandra is currently planning our lab’s first ever EEG study of auditory attention. If you have any tips or advice, we would love to hear from you.
Analysis time
Several studies — including our two third year projects and several of Sandra’s PhD experiments — are currently in the final stages of data collection and analysis. It’s an exciting (and slightly nervous) time as we wait for the results. Thanks to all our participants. We will let you know what we find!
Happy new year!
And congratulations to Sandra on her successful PhD upgrade this week. We are now eagerly awaiting the results of her latest study on real-world distractability. Our two undergraduate research project groups are also due to finish data collection soon. Welcome back everyone.
New third year projects
We have two exciting new research projects starting up at the moment. Cassandra, Sharayne, Holly and Kate will be looking at the effects of task choice on attention performance. And Catriona, Jenny, Camilla and Nicola will be looking at the links between auditory attention and awareness. The projects are currently undergoing scrutiny by the ethics committee, so we should be ready to start testing in a couple of weeks. Good luck everyone!
Summer studies
We are nearing the end of term and most of our undergraduate students will soon be heading home. But we will have studies running throughout the summer, so if you are staying in Egham and would like to take part, do get in touch.
PS We should probably clarify that our research doesn’t actually involve any ice cream. Sorry!
Vancouver visit
While in Vancouver recently for a wedding, Polly also enjoyed a brief visit to Jim Enns’s Vision Lab at the University of British Columbia. They are doing some really interesting work, looking at the influence of cognitive factors on behaviour that is visible to a third person.
A new project begins
We have recently welcomed Sandra Murphy to the Attention Lab. She is starting a PhD project on auditory attention. Sandra will soon be needing lots of participants, so do get in touch if you’re interested in taking part.
Participants required…
We’re currently running a new experiment in the lab which involves listening to immersive, realistic 3D sound recordings (again, recorded using a special dummy head), and are looking for more people to take part. It takes about 10 minutes, and we’ve been getting really good feedback from the people who’ve taken part so far: most people seem to have found it genuinely fun and interesting!
If you’re interested, please do get in touch for more information or to arrange a time to come and take part.
E-Prime Tricks
Over the course of building numerous experiments in PST’s E-Prime, I’ve picked up a number of tricks that I find useful. A lot of these are in fact quite basic programming techniques, but ones which seem to me worth documenting because I initially found it non-obvious how to implement them in E-Prime. Partly for my own reference, and partly in the hope that they might be of use to other E-Prime users, I’m planning over the next few weeks to write up and post the tricks I’ve discovered so far, as well as new ones as I discover them. I would of course be very interested to hear if anyone has comments or feedback, or alternative ways of achieving the same effects (or, for that matter, other useful tricks of their own).