On 29 April, Andrey Nikolaev from the Department of Psychology at Lund University will give a method-focused talk on combining EEG with eye tracking. All welcome!

Abstract

Experimental psychology is increasingly shifting from constrained laboratory settings to tasks that more closely resemble real-world scenarios. Traditional laboratory experiments often present stimuli fixed in a single location on a screen, preventing active viewing, i.e., the integral involvement of eye movements in the neural processes underlying perception, attention, and memory. These limitations can be overcome by using methods that facilitate psychological experimentation under naturalistic viewing conditions. To achieve this, I combine EEG and eye-tracking in tasks that allow unrestricted eye movement. This approach enables the examination of psychological tasks with higher ecological validity, more accurately reflecting real-world cognitive processes. EEG-eye-tracking coregistration has been shown to be informative for a variety of psychological conditions and brain states, closely aligning with central research goals in cognitive psychology and neuroscience. My talk will begin with an introduction to the methodology of EEG-eye movement coregistration. I will then illustrate how this technique has been successfully applied in various areas of cognitive psychology, focusing on the neural mechanisms underlying refixations - the return of gaze to previously visited locations - which occur frequently in many visual tasks, including reading. Finally, I will present recent findings from ongoing research at the Lund Memory Lab.