Scientific

Abstract – The visual system must organize dynamic input into meaningful percepts across time, balancing between stability and sensitivity to change. The Temporal Integration Window (TIW) has been hypothesized to underlie this balance: if two or more stimuli fall within the same TIW, they are integrated into a single percept; those that fall in different windows are segmented. Visual TIWs have mainly been studied in adults, showing average windows of 65 ms. However, it is unclear how temporal windows develop throughout early childhood. Differences in TIWs can influence high-level cognitive and perceptual processes that require well-adapted timing, such as object individuation, apparent motion, action sequence perception, language processing, action planning, and pragmatic aspects of communication, such as interactional synchrony. Because of the fundamental role temporal processing plays in visual perception, it is important then, to understand not only the trajectory of how TIWs change over typical development (TD) but also neurodevelopmental disorders like autism spectrum disorder (ASD). My work uncovered the developmental trajectory of visual temporal processing in young children with and without autism as well as mapped the development of peak alpha frequency – a potential neural correlate of visual temporal processing. https://ski.org/users/julie-freschl

Abstract – Eye movement is an observable behavior relating to visual attention, which can be characterized into two types: one a bottom-up process that is solely based on the visual input and the other a top-down process that is influenced by the behavioral goal. These two types of attention are largely considered to correspond to the eye movements made during free viewing and visual search tasks, respectively. Recent development of deep learning methods provides the opportunity for training models of fixation prediction and comparing their performance. However, most visual search studies that have recorded eye movement have been small-scale efforts limited to only dozens or a few hundreds of unique search images. There is no image dataset labeled with search fixations that is large and general enough for training deep network models, nor are there parallel datasets of search and free-viewing behavior to provide a direct comparison between these two tasks on the same images. To fill in this gap, we created COCO-Search18 and COCO-FreeView, large-scale datasets of eye fixations from people either searching for a target object or freely viewing the same images. We characterized eye movement behaviors in both datasets and trained deep network models to predict fixations on a disjoint test dataset. Additionally, we also collected COCO-CursorSearch, a third parallel dataset using the same images and 18 target categories as COCO-Search18 but with people using a “foveated” mouse-deblurring paradigm to manually search for targets. We validate our mouse movement approximation of search fixations and will discuss the potential that online data collection has for modeling attention. https://ski.org/users/yupei-chen

Dear Fellow Scientists, Jason and I will lead the Ethics Seminar on Mentorship on Wednesday. As you know, attendance at the Ethics Seminar series is mandatory for all postdocs as well as for current and prospective mentors that. Active participation is also strongly encouraged, so please take a look at the attached reading material and come prepared for a lively discussion. The reading materials for this discussion are attached. As part of the SKERI postdoctoral fellowship program and as recipients of the NEI Institutional postdoctoral grant, we are required to have quarterly Ethics seminars. NEI requires all potential mentors and all postdocs to take active part in these seminars. Please note this is a 90-minute meeting. Improving Zoom accessibility for people with hearing impairments People with hearing impairments often use lipreading and speechreading to improve speech comprehension. This approach is helpful but only works if the speaker’s face and mouth are clearly visible. For the benefit of people with hearing impairments on Zoom calls, please enable your device’s camera whenever you are speaking on Zoom, and face the camera while you speak. (Feel free to disable your camera when you aren’t speaking.) Dear Fellow Scientists, Jason and I will lead the Ethics Seminar on Mentorship on Wednesday.  As you know,  attendance at the Ethics Seminar series is mandatory for all postdocs as well as for current and prospective mentors that. Active participation is also strongly encouraged, so please take a look at the attached reading material and come prepared for a lively discussion.   The reading materials for this discussion are attached. As part of the SKERI postdoctoral fellowship program and as recipients of the NEI Institutional postdoctoral grant, we are required to have quarterly Ethics seminars. NEI requires all potential mentors and all postdocs to take active part in these seminars.   Please note this is a 90-minute meeting. Improving Zoom accessibility for people with hearing impairments  People with hearing impairments often use lipreading and speechreading to improve speech comprehension. This approach is helpful but only works if the speaker’s face and mouth are clearly visible. For the benefit of people with hearing impairments on Zoom calls, please enable your device’s camera whenever you are speaking on Zoom, and face the camera while you speak. (Feel free to disable your camera when you aren’t speaking.)