Research
Our work treats eye movements as a real-time measure of cognition. We study how people allocate attention, process written language, recover from difficulty and control where the eyes move next. We also develop methods that make eye-movement research more scalable and accessible.
Reading & oculomotor control
Reading requires a rapid sequence of decisions about when and where to move the eyes. We study how visual and linguistic information guides those decisions, with particular interest in multiline reading, return-sweep saccades, regressions, refixations and parafoveal processing.
Current questions: How is a new line targeted? Why do readers regress? What information is used when the eyes return to an earlier word?
Attention & distraction
Unexpected sounds and irrelevant speech can disrupt ongoing cognition. We use eye movements to identify when distraction begins to affect visual processing and whether its effects arise during attentional selection, saccade planning or later processing.
Current questions: How do novelty and background speech alter reading? Are the same mechanisms visible in more naturalistic visual tasks?
Individual differences
We are developing work that combines eye movements, behavioural measures and computational methods to study individual differences in attention. A current programme uses laboratory data from adults with and without ADHD and explores how these measures could be extended to remote assessment.
Current questions: Which eye-movement signatures are reliable across tasks? Can attentional state be modelled from sample-level gaze data?
Measurement at scale
Traditional eye-tracking research provides precise measurement but often uses relatively small samples. We study how browser-based webcam eye tracking can reproduce established effects and, more importantly, enable new high-powered and large-scale research designs.
Current questions: How accurate and stable can browser-based gaze estimation become? Which psychological questions benefit most from hundreds or thousands of participants?
Method development
OpenEyeTrack is an open-source browser-based webcam eye-tracking platform under active development. It includes calibration and validation workflows, recording tools, gaze estimation and head-position monitoring, with the longer-term goal of providing a transparent platform for scalable eye-movement research.
How we work
High-resolution eye-movement recording for reading, visual attention and oculomotor-control experiments.
Remote gaze measurement designed to extend eye-movement research beyond specialist laboratory settings.
Mixed-effects models, Bayesian methods, machine learning and models of time-varying attentional behaviour.
Preregistration, reusable analysis pipelines, open-source software, shared materials and evidence synthesis.
Prospective students
See current project directions and information about approaching the group.