In our lab we routinely make use of dichoptic stimulus presentation (presenting a different image to each eye), mainly to induce binocular rivalry. We also often record the eyes during our experiments, to keep track of the participant's gaze position and pupil size. Because the combined use of dichoptic stimulus presentation and eye tracking can be difficult, we developed an easy-to-build setup that makes that combination feasible. Click the video below to see an explanation of the setup. Or read about it here or here.

A central question in our work is how the neural events in your brain give rise to your perceptual experience. In this context we are interested to learn which parts of the brain are responsible for selecting your perceptual experience when you view an ambiguous display that can be perceived in more than one way. Click the video below to learn about one of our papers on this topic. Or read the paper here.

Although in experimental psychology we traditionally bring our participants into a controlled lab environment to test them, it is becoming increasingly popular to administer psychology experiments online. What's really useful about that approach is that one can test many people in a short period of time, and also that researchers with an interest in participants of a rare kind (for instance ones with rare forms of color blindness) can find a great number of those online. But a substantial problem is that participants' home setups are not as well controlled and calibrated as the ones in the lab. To partly deal with that, we developed a procedure that allows experimenters to quickly estimate two important aspects of a participant's setup: how large his/her screen pixels are, and how far he/she is sitting from the screen. See how well the procedure works by trying it here! You can also read more about its scientific background, or examine the underlying computer code.

Alan Turing is an important figure in cognitive science because of his role in early computer science and artificial intelligence. He was also a codebreaker during World War Two, and I dove into that part of his story for a cognitive science course that I teach. In this document I explain how the Germans encrypted their secret messages and how Turing went about deciphering them.