Research projects

OU 2021-

After almost 2 years away from a university setting, I have taken up an assistant professorship at the Open University of the Netherlands.

SWOV 2019-2021

From June 2019 to April 2021 I have worked at the SWOV Institute for Road Safety Research, where I contributed to various projects related to road safety. These include:

Calculating the road safety effects of introducing a levy for trucks
User survey and heuristics-based analysis of the European Road Safety Observatory website
Survey of applications of text mining, computer vision and machine learning for acquisition and analysis of road safety data
Survey of methods and devices to detect fatigue and distraction in drivers
Survey of practices in trauma care for road crash casualties
Analysis of infrastructure data
Analysis of trends in the number of road traffic deaths
Analysis of survey responses of an app blocking phone use in cyclists
Analysis of Dutch road safety statistics in an international context
Analysis of agreement in infrastructure annotation from photos

Tilburg 2018-2019

Following the Brexit vote, I returned to the Netherlands and joined the department of Cognitive Science and Artificial Intelligence at Tilburg University. I taught on and coordinated the Basic Programming (Python), Research Skills: R, and Interactive Visualization and applied data visualisation courses, and supervised various MSc thesis projects that analysed data from past research projects or collected and analysed new data (for example, eye movements in a surgical simulator task, eye movements during crime scene investigation, eye movements during health choices, eye movements during restaurant menu choices, and eye movements for online adverts). The Interactive visualisation course yielded data and Opensesame files for a series of cognitive psychology experiments (e.g., anchoring, economic decision making, first impressions), available on the Open Science Framework, via this link.

Lincoln 2015-2018

From 2015 to 2018 I worked as a senior lecturer in the School of Psychology at the University of Lincoln, where I taught on research methods, statistics, computer programming, and visual perception courses, and supervised dissertation and thesis projects. Most of my research involved eye tracking, for example studying the visual aspects of fear of crime, texting while walking stairs, eye movements related to political views, and social interaction in Parkinson's disease.

Aberdeen 2012-2015

During my lectureship at the university of Aberdeen, I taught on de research methods (Level 2, MRes), visual perception (Level 3) and critical reviews (Level 4) courses, supervised dissertation projects (for example, on end-state comfort in grasping movements and simultaneous visual masking) and conducted research, mostly in the domain of eye movement research (e.g., projects together with HERU, the general surgery department at ARI, and the computer science department).

Leuven 2010-2012

In my research project, funded by FWO, I have investigated perceptual grouping using response times and eye movement measures. This work was conducted in collaboration with several people. Research investigating how perceptual grouping affects eye movement metrics was conducted together with Tandra Ghose and Johan Wagemans. A project examining eye movements during art perception, involved a collaboration with Ruth Loos and Johan Wagemans (see Ruth Loos' project website and the i-Perception paper: Loos, 2012). Other work involved eye movements in contour integration (with Nathalie van Humbeeck, Udo Ernst and Johan Wagemans), the use of survival analysis to study visual masking (with Sven Panis and Johan Wagemans), a regions of interest analysis for dynamic stimuli (with Kris Evers, Peter de Graef, Rudy Dekeerschieter, and Johan Wagemans), response inhibition in the saccadic Stroop task, and the influence of advertisements on eye movements during economic decision making. Data from a study on the influence of head movements on the detection of microsaccades using the Eyelink II system can be found here.

RHUL 2009

This ESRC funded research project, carried out in the lab of Robin Walker, investigated whether social cues, such as someone's gaze, automatically shift the observer's attention and induce an automatic response, such as an eye movement in the gazed-at or pointed-at direction. To investigate such automatic response preparation also when no overt response is made, the small movements of the eyes (known as 'microsaccades') are analysed. In addition, on a portion of the trials, participants are asked to make a saccade to a target object elsewhere in the display, so that the trajectories of these saccadic eye movements can be analysed for signs of the suppression of an automatic response to the social cue, for example, by looking at the curvature of the saccade trajectory.

Marseille 2008

In this project, carried out in the lab of Françoise Vitu (continued by Christophe Tandonnet), the role of the 'global effect' in reading is studied. When we make an eye movements towards a target in the presence of distractor, the eyes often land in between the target and the distractor (the 'global effect'; Findlay 1982). This effect seems to reflect competition between the possible saccade targets during the preparation of an eye movement.

RHUL 2007-2008

My project at Royal Holloway University of London, carried out in the labs of Johannes Zanker and Robin Walker at Royal Holloway University of London, focused on the eye movements that people make while they try not to move their eyes, known as fixational eye movements (eye movements during visual fixation). These fixational eye movements can be classified into three categories: Tremor, which are small, but fast movements of the eye, drift, which are large but slow movements, and microsaccad es, which are fast and relatively large eye movements (compared to tremor).

One part of the project involved the study of fixational eye movements while looking at Op Art. Some of these Op Art paintings, such as Bridget Riley's "Fall" (1963), induce strong motion percepts. It was hypothesized that the motion illusion originates from the small eye movements that people make while fixating an object (see Zanker & Walker, 2004). Previous research focused on the role of micro-saccades in the illusory motion. In my project, we investigated what role drift plays. In the second part of my research project, we investigated of the origin of microsaccades and their role in visual attention. For this, we determined the effect of different cues as to where to move the eyes (peripheral target, arrow cue) on the rate and the direction of microsaccades before the onset of the eye movement.

EPFL 2004-2007

The focus of my work in the lab of Michael Herzog at the Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne (EPFL) was on visual masking. In visual masking, a target stimulus is rendered less visible by a masking stimulus, which is presented before ('forward masking'), after ('backward masking') the target or at the same time as the target ('simultaneous masking'). Whereas past research has demonstrated the importance of temporal aspects, such as the relative timing of the stimuli and their durations, we found that spatia l aspects, such as the spatial layout of the target and the mask, are equally important. For example, by increasing the length of two lines in a mask consisting of 25 lines, its effect on a preceding target strongly increased (see Hermens & Herzog, 2007). Many of these effects could well be modelled with a simple model applying lateral inhibition and excitation only (see Hermens & Ernst, 2007), suggesting that although many effects seemed to involve complex grouping operations, they can actually be implemented in terms of low-level visual interactions.

A second line of research involved feature fusion. If two stimuli are presented in rapid succession, their features can fuse. For example, a green disc followed by a red disc can appear yellow. Together with Frank Scharnowski, we have investigated the underlying mechanisms of the fusion of stimulus features providing evidence for two types of visual memory (one in which information decays quickly, and one which holds information longer).

Nijmegen, Utrecht, Penn State 2001-2004

My PhD project, conducted in the labs of Stan Gielen and Astrid Kappers, focussed on the perception of object orientation. If participants are asked to match the orientation of a bar, they make systematic errors. These errors also affect the interception of an approaching line.

During a four months research project in the lab of David Rosenbaum at Penn State University, funded by a Fulbright grant, we investigated the planning of grasping movements. Participants were asked to grasp a salad bowl and to bring it to one of several predefined positions and put it into a particular orientation. In contrast to previous findings, we did not find that participants chose their grasp according to target position and orientation of the bowl.

MPI 1999-2000

In my MA project, carried out at the Max Plank Institute for psycholinguistics in Nijmegen, the retrieval of words from the mental lexicon in language production was investigated. Participants were asked to name two or more pictures presented on the screen in one phrase such as `The bike and the arrow'. By measuring response times and recording eye movements, we investigated whether retrieving the names of the two pictures interfered, and whether such interference depended on whether the names were semantically related ('The apple and the pear') or phonologically related ('The book and the cook').

Google Sites

Report abuse