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).
Experiment: Auditory Attention
We’re currently looking for people to take part in a short experiment on auditory attention which involves sitting at a computer for about 10 mins and responding to sounds played over headphones. We can pay participants £2 for taking part.
If you’re interested in taking part, or would like to know more, please get in touch.
Science Open Day
Last Saturday’s Science Open Day was a great success – as well as being a generally fun day, an incredible number of visitors came along, which meant we were able to run our binaural listening experiment continuously all day. We very much enjoyed talking to people about their reactions to the experiment and the binaural recordings, and would like to thank everyone who took part. We’re now looking forward to analysing all the data we collected on Saturday.
Dummy Head Recording
This week we’ve been recording a lot of sounds using a recording technique known as “binaural recording” or, more specifically, “dummy head recording”. This involves using an acoustically realistic dummy head with microphones in its ears to produce recordings which, when listened to on headphones, convey an extremely realistic sense of space – often creating the illusion that the sound is actually in the room around the listener. This is because the acoustics of the head and especially the ears play very important roles in allowing us to derive spatial information from the sound that we hear – information which is lost with most ordinary recording techniques.
To hear an example of what these recordings sound like, try listening to this with headphones:
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(Sounds in this example: jangling keys, rustling bags, fake motorbike engine)
The primary purpose of the recordings that we’re making is for an experiment / activity that we’re planning to run at the Science Open Day here at Royal Holloway on the 27th February, but if that goes well we’re hoping to use them subsequently in a range of auditory attention-related experiments.