School of Philosophy, Psychology and Language Sciences

PPLS Resources - Eye-tracking Facilities

Eye-tracking Facilities

Eye-Tracking Research Facilitator: Dr Rob McIntosh

Eye-tracking Laboratory, Dugald Stewart Building

The PPLS eyetracking labratory, located in the Dugald Stewart Building basement, has two machines available as a resource for all staff within the School interested in conducting eyetracking research, but who do not have their own equipment. The lab is a joint venture between Human Cognitive Neuroscience (HCN) and Language Cognition and Communication (LCC) in Psychology.

Both rooms B.05 and B.06 have computer workstations dedicated to programming eye-tracking experiments and eye movement data analysis. Software includes SR Research Experiment Builder and Data Viewer, MATLAB and SPSS.

In addition to the dedicated local license in both B.05 and B.06, a network license is available that allows 14 people on the network (shared between PPLS and Informatics) to simultaneously use SR software (Experiment Builder and Data Viewer) for experiment preparation and data analysis. Both Microsoft Windows and Mac OSX platforms are supported. By default, Experiment Builder looks for a license server on the same physical network that you are connected to so it may find the license server without having to do anything extra. If however you are not on the same physical network you need to provide the address of the server in a file called nethasp.ini. This is the same file that the windows version of Experiment Builder uses but for OSX the file needs to be placed in either your home directory or in /etc. To use the license on a different server under Windows the nethasp.ini file needs to be placed in c:\windows\system32, or if using a 64 bit version of Windows7, in windows/SysWOW64. Contact Cedric Macmartin for a copy of nethasp.ini with the details for the server. Additionally, if you are not connected to the university network (i.e., off campus) or are using the university wirleless network then you also need to connect via the university's VPN service.

Joint Eye-tracking Lab

Simultaneous recording Eye trackers are able to determine where on a computer screen the subject is looking. They are used in Psychology and Psycholinguistics research to help discover the mechanisms of language processing in the brain.

Computational Visual Cognition Lab

Reading and Word Recognition Lab

Reading Comprehension Laboratory