Great Night at the Night of Science in Hamburg 2017

During the Night of Science event in Hamburg, we (me, Lea Kampermann and Lukas Neugebauer) introduced the eye-tracking technique to our guests, and illustrated it with the classical change blindness experiment.

We explained the basics of the eye-tracking and illustrated it with a classical experiment in visual neurosciences, namely the phenomenon of change blindness. We received about 60 people, and recorded eye-movements from 10 volunteers. Below I prepared an animated GIF that shows both the images shown to volunteers and the location that are most fixated by one volunteers. Overall our efforts were rewarded as being the highest rated demo during the night in our department.

Nine images shown to ten volunteers during the Night of Science event in Hamburg. The animation above consists of 3 different images.  The first two consist of flickering images presented during the experiment to induce change blindness; and the last one is the semi-transparent fixation map showing locations that were most attended by all volunteers.

For more information on change blindness, there is probably no better source than Kevan O'Regan's webpage whose name is closely associated with this phenomenon. For preparing the demo, we actually used many of the images that were used in the original publication. Furthermore, his webpage provides also a rich and original source of information on vision and perception.

Advanced Numerical Methods in Neuroscience Lecture is now online

Advanced Numerical Methods in Neuroscience is a lecture I am holding in the graduate school Neurodapt. You can reach the overview of the lecture from this link and download the course material from this link.

During the Experiment

The participant is being recorded in the scanner while this movie is taken.

The movie starts with a view on the monitor of the Eyelink 2000 stimulus-computer that shows the current stimuli presented to the subject being scanned, together with his eye position depicted as a bluish circle moving from mouth toward between the eyes. At some point later one can see the eye of the participant with the detected pupil and Purkinje images. 

The second view is on the physio-computer that records breathing, pulse-oxymeter, and the skin conductance data. The physio-data is AD converted using CED system, it all runs with Spike2 software. Skin-conductance recordings are carried out with a BioPac system. The TRIO scanner is also connected directly to the CED system to record the start of each volume acquisition.

In the next few seconds, there is a glimpse on the CED rack that is used to A/D convert the data. The Digitimer current generator that is connected to the participant's hand via an electrode for Pavlovian conditioning is unfortunately not seen.

The third view is on the stimulus computer that presents images to the participant. Stimuli are presented using Matlab and Psychophysics Toolbox. The connection between Matlab and the Eyelink system is done via Eyelink Toolbox through an ethernet connection. Matlab is also connected to the CED system to store the onset of the relevant events as sequences of pulses together with the pulses of the scanner.

Last few shots wander around control desk showing some basic brain slices and the volunteer lying in the magnet on a background of noisy people.

 

PhD Thesis, Presentation, Latex Template

I recently defended my thesis. I am uploading my presentation with idea that somebody might find it useful and get some inspiration. 

The pdf file can be found here here.

If you like the layout of this thesis, you may find it useful to download the latex template that is used to generate it from here.

I share this with the idea that anyone who would like to start writing their theses, could easily use this template to start up producing, rather than wasting time to optimize the look of the final thesis. It might take considerable time until everything appears reasonably good.

The good starting point is the PhDThesis_Selim.tex file, where all the subsequent chapters (in the form of .tex files) are referred and included. The figures are not included in the zip package therefore if you compile PhDThesis_Selim.tex file it will not succeed.