eye think lab

psychology somewhere between perception and cognition

What is the link between thinking and seeing? How are individuals’ thought processes related to the people around them? In the eyethink lab, we use gaze, speech and motion tracking technology to investigate how perception and cognition are embedded in the social world. We present pictures, speech and movies to participants. They watch the displays, recall information, form opinions, talk to each other and play games. We explore how the identity, beliefs and simply the presence of other people can influence individuals’ cognitive and perceptual processing. On this website, you can learn more about our projects, download papers and perhaps become involved in our research.

Since the summer of 2008, the eye think lab has been part of the Multimodal Lab in the Department of Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain sciences at University College London. Previously it lived in the Psychology Department, at UC Santa Cruz. The lab director is Daniel C. Richardson.

Watch the short preview of our research projects, and click on any topics of interest to read more. Or you can go directly to a project page from the research menu above.

social referencing

Imagine (or remember) being the only member of social group in the room. In everyone’s earshot, a person makes a remark about your social group that borders on the offensive. What happens at this point? All eyes in the room turn to you. We have investigates why this happens, and what it says about our understanding of others' point of view.

spatial indexing

Have you ever been sat in a classroom, struggling with an exam, and found that you can remember exactly where on an empty blackboard the lecturer wrote a vital piece of information, but not what was written? In the Hollywood Squares project we investigate this powerful link between spatial location and memory, which means that sometimes we spend time looking at nothing at all.

gaze coordination

Imagine standing in front of a painting, discussing it with a friend. Your eyes will be drawn by characteristics of the image itself as well as what is said. What is the relationship between your eye movements and those of your friend? How is that relationship related to the flow of conversation between you? We have discovered a link between the coordination of visual attention and the mutual understanding of two people in conversation.

joint perception

Imagine watching a TV show. How do you think your experience of it would differ if you knew that, across town, your friend was watching it at the same time? We investigated this issue by tracking the gaze of people while they looked at pictures. They were told that a person in the room next door was either looking at the same images as them, or something different. We found that this 'minimal social context' can change a perceptual process.

figurative language

How does the way in which someone describes a scene alter how you look at it? How are these visual and linguistic processes coordinated, and how do they influence each other? We examined the effect of figurative language on perception

group action

When singing at a football match or a concert, when voting in an election or rioting in the streets, how do large groups of people coordinate their actions with each other? In this project we gave a hundred people a handset each and asked them to play a tightrope balancing game together

self reflection

What do you feel when you look at your self in the mirror? We showed visitors to the London Science Museum pictures and videos of faces, one of which was their own. We investigated the relationship between their gaze patterns during self reflection and their mood and personality.