BVI Seminar: Eye Movements in Low and Normally Sighted Vision

Brian Sullivan, University of Bristol, School of Experimental Psychology

 I will present two studies examining human eye movements and discuss my role at the University of Bristol. The first study concerns patients with central vision loss who often adopt a preferred retinal locus (PRL), a region in peripheral vision used for fixation as alternative to the damaged fovea. A common clinical approach to assess the PRL is to record monocular fixation behavior of a small stimulus using a scanning laser ophthalmoscope. Using a combination of visual field tests and eye tracking, we tested how well the ‘fixational PRL’ generalizes to PRL use during a pointing task. Our results suggest that measures of the fixational PRL do not sufficiently capture the PRL variation exhibited while pointing, and can inform patient therapy and future research. In the second study, eye movements from eight participants were recorded with a mobile eye tracker. Participants performed five everyday tasks: Making a sandwich, transcribing a document, walking in an office and a city street, and playing catch with a flying disc. Using only saccadic direction and amplitude time series data, we trained a hidden Markov model for each task and were then able to classify unlabeled data. Lastly, I will briefly describe my role in the GLANCE Project at the University of Bristol. We are an interdisciplinary group in the departments of Experimental Psychology and Computer Science, sponsored by the EPSRC to make a wearable assistive device that would monitor behavior in tasks and present short video clips to guide behavior in real-time