At Olympic racing sports, the gold goes to whoever is the most talented and has trained the hardest. Or does it? Our new research shows that subtle random differences in starting procedures can bias athletes’ alertness. This makes them slower to respond to the starting shot, resulting in a higher finishing time. This small bias can the difference between winning gold, and not even being on the podium!
One underlying issue in psychopathy is an inability to use contextual information (e.g. the look on someone’s face) to guide attention. New research shows that psychopathic traits are associated with top-down, but not with bottom-up attention. In non-psych lingo: psychopaths are very focussed on the task at hand, and have issues in directing their attention to information that is irrelevant to said task (even if it might have helped them perform better).
Introducing MPy150: an easy-to-use Python library for using a BIOPAC MP150. Sample code included!
In Gmail, you can set a vacation responder, which is great for automatic replies. But it offers no selectivity for people that have more than one address linked to their account: You can’t set the vacation responder to reply only to emails that were sent to your work address! That’s annoying. Fortunately, this little hack does allow you to set a selective auto-reply.
The EyeTribe tracker is really cheap, and you can now use it in Python and in Matlab. It’s not as bad as you would expect from its price, and you could probably use it in fixation or pupillometry studies. For in-depth info, read this validation study.
PyGaze Analyser is a new (basic) tool to create gaze data visualisations such as heatmaps. The code is open source and free to use. Read the post for example images and the download link!
Building your own eye tracker for dirt cheap. How hard can it be? Turns out the basics are surprisingly simple! This post explains how, including demo videos and source code.