Liam Blything (Alberta)

The Visual World Paradigm (VWP) is an eye-tracking method that focuses on spoken language processing. VWP presents participants with pictures, scenes, or videos on screen, while they listen to spoken stimuli, making it well suited to the investigation of: lexical, sentence, and discourse processing, the interaction between visual and linguistic information, and especially online comprehension in young children and other populations.

Through practical experience, the course will demonstrate how to use Experiment Builder to create a VWP that can run on an SR Research Eyelink eye tracker. 

We will first consider experimental design, and the kinds of materials required for putting together an experiment, and what resources are available for achieving this. In doing so, we will focus on the importance of creating a datasource that can be inputted into Experiment Builder so that the program recognises important aspects of the experimental design such as the randomisation of experimental blocks (e.g., practice and experiment), conditions and trial-by-trial items; the setting up of the screen location coordinates for visual stimuli; and item-by-item randomisation of the screen locations for visual stimuli. A core aspect of the course is for participants to learn how to build hierarchical graph sequences that will ultimately develop into an operational VWP – which participants will have the opportunity to deploy and run towards the end of the course.  There is no prerequisite for this course.

Background reading:

Salverda, A. P., & Michael, K. (2017). Chapter 5 – The Visual World Paradigm. In De Groot, A. M. B., & Hagoort, P. (Eds.), Research Methods in Psycholinguistics and the Neurobiology of Language: A Practical Guide. Oxford: Wiley.