Eye-tracking technology: Understanding what we really see

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Our eyes are imperfect, but we don’t notice their limitations. This reality and its implications for artists and film-makers were clearly shown during a Science Week lecture at Birkbeck.

There was audience participation too, as the eye movements of volunteers were tracked with high-speed infrared cameras to prove what happens when people look at pictures and films.

Dr Tim Smith, of the Department of Psychological Sciences at Birkbeck, shared his research during the talk, including his work with Tate Britain to help restore a famous painting.

He began his talk on Wednesday 29 March by outlining the theory of vision science – the study of how people view, perceive and remember visual scenes, and how this influences their actions.

In practice, our eyes often fail to detect changes in the background because they can only focus on a small proportion of the visual field and process a limited amount of information. This “phenomenon of change blindness” is significant as it means viewers can be distracted from what is happening. Smith said: “What we think we see is rarely actually what we see.”

A masterpiece restored

Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by John Martin

Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by John Martin

Art and science are often closely linked, and Smith demonstrated how he has applied insights from vision science to inform art conservation.

In 2010, Tate Britain decided to attempt a restoration of the flood-damaged 19th century masterpiece Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum by John Martin. A large section of the dramatic painting, which documents the eruption of Mount Vesuvius, was lost, and Smith was asked for his expertise to recommend how to remedy this. He used eye-tracking equipment to assess how viewers would look at four prototypes of restored versions of the painting: fully restored, restored but with less detail in the filled section, muted colour in the filled section, or a neutrally coloured infill.

His findings showed that the eyes of viewers were drawn to the edges of the lost section when it was filled with a muted or neutral colour, and this detracted from the original intention of the artist as this was where the mouth of the volcano was supposed to be.

Informed by Smith’s research, Tate conservator Sarah Maisey embarked on a reversible reconstruction of the lost section. Some detail was omitted in the reconstructed section, allowing viewers to see the entire main content of the painting while spending most of their time viewing the original sections. The painting was exhibited during the recent John Martin Apocalypse exhibition at Tate Britain, and Smith said the reaction to the restoration was “overwhelmingly positive.”

Cinematic continuity
Smith continued by demonstrating how gaze patterns generated by eye-tracking technology also show how people watch films. He outlined the history of film and editing conventions, and explained how film-makers replicate the way people attend to, and perceive, reality. This includes focusing on motion, helps lead to a seamless representation, and means that edits largely go unnoticed in today’s films, where the average duration of a shot is only 2.5 seconds. Smith added: “If we compose edited sequences according to these conventions, we can make viewers blind to a large proportion of the actual cuts.”

Astrobiology: The search for life on Mars and beyond

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This post was contributed by Guy Collender from Birkbeck’s External Relations Department.

There might be life on planets other than Earth, but it hasn’t been discovered yet and Birkbeck scientists are playing their part in the search.

This quest, the awe-inspiring enormity of the universe and the Earth’s 4.5 billion-year history were all discussed at a fascinating lecture as part of Science Week.

The talk on Tuesday 27 March was delivered by Dr Ian Crawford, of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences, at Birkbeck.

He mentioned how Birkbeck’s expertise is contributing towards the European Space Agency’s mission to land a spacecraft on Mars and drill below its surface. Dr Claire Cousins is involved through her work at the UCL/Birkbeck Centre for Planetary Sciences in the scientific development of the camera for the ExoMars rover.  

Dr Claire Cousins, of UCL/Birkbeck Centre for Planetary Sciences, carrying out experiments in the Arctic. Photo credit: Kjell Ove Storvik

Dr Claire Cousins, of UCL/Birkbeck Centre for Planetary Sciences, carrying out experiments in the Arctic. Photo credit: Kjell Ove Storvik

Crawford began by explaining his life-long interest in astrobiology – the science of trying to find life elsewhere in the universe based on the history of life on Earth. He said: “The Earth, as far as we know, is the only inhabited planet in the universe. What we know about life on Earth must inform our search.”

Life on Earth
A timeline was set out to show the history of the Earth and the slow evolutionary development of life upon our planet.

Following the birth of the Earth 4.5 billion years ago, its surface was bombarded by giant meteorites and its oceans were vapourised for the first few million years. This was followed by the emergence of a warm, wet and rocky planet – all necessary conditions for supporting life.

As a result, micro-organisms were born about 4 billion years ago. The transition from such origins of life to complex lifeforms took many millions of years, with multi-celled animals similar to “jellyfish” only appearing 600 million years ago.

Today there are thousands of planets across the universe that resemble the Earth as it was when it began to support life 4 billion years ago. This fact led Crawford to predict that microbial life might be common elsewhere in the universe, but multi-celled animals and intelligent life might be rare.

Searching for life on Mars
The history of Mars exploration followed, including details about the six spacecraft that have landed on the red planet. The dried-up river valleys on Mars indicate that rivers did exist in earlier times, leading Crawford to suggest that it was an “inhabitable” planet in the past.

He said: “There is no doubt that Mars was a warm, wet and rocky place, exactly the kind of place that life should have evolved upon.” Today’s Mars is inhospitable due to its the cold temperatures (-60 degrees), no ozone layer, and its red, dusty surface.

Despite finding nothing so far, the search for whether Mars supports life now, or ever did in the past, continues. The Mars Science Laboratory robot is due to land on the red planet this August, and the plan is for the ExoMars rover to follow suit in 2018.

Future space exploration
Crawford added that there will be no definitive answers about current or past life on Mars until field geologists step foot on the planet, and this remains years away. In response to a question, Crawford said that sending humans to Mars might, technologically, be possible by 2030 (more likely by 2060), but this would be unlikely because of economic and political considerations.

He also spoke about the need for better telescopes, and other potentially inhabitable parts of the solar system, including Europa – one of Jupiter’s moons – and Enceladus – one of Saturn’s moons.

Extraterrestrial intelligence
The question of aliens was also addressed, with Crawford saying that it is unlikely that extraterrestrial intelligence will be discovered, especially as nothing has been discovered since the search began 50 years ago. Whereas finding multi-celled animals elsewhere in the universe might be rare, finding lifeforms capable of sending technology might be even rarer. He said: “I think the galaxy looks like a quiet place.”

Despite finding nothing so far, Crawford stressed the importance of continuing to search for life in the universe.

WAR-net meeting

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This post was contributed by Kate McLoughlin of the Department of English and Humanities.

On 9 March 2012, I organised the fourth biannual WAR-Net meeting at Birkbeck. The meeting was a showcase of members’ interests. Papers ranged from Virtual Iraq to the comedy of war in eighteenth-century novels and prints. Panels covered Holocaust representation, the First World War, the Second World War, visual representation and gender.

The opening keynote, by Professor Debra Kelly of the University of Westminster, was a fascinating exploration of the Free French presence in Second World War London, a presentation that resonated with many of the French delegates to the conference.

Professor Mary Favret closed proceedings with a keynote on wartime Britain’s Fast and Humiliation, a thought-provoking presentation on an eighteenth-century practice now most closely mirrored by the twenty-first-century apology.

You can download speakers’ abstracts and listen to podcasts of the keynote talks on the WAR-Net webpages.

 

I-D: The Boundaries of Identity: The multiple identities of multilingualism

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This post was contributed by Bryony Merritt, from Birkbeck’s Department of External Relations.

Tonight’s lecture was the second in the series of lectures being organised by the School of Social Sciences, History and Philosophy around the theme of identity.

Dr Derek Hook was the first speaker and he started by saying that “Identity is one of the most over-used and under-defined terms in social theory”.  He then introduced the audience to the concept of identification. This he described as the psychological process of assimilating an aspect or attribute of the other, and in the process being transformed wholly or partially.

Identification is not the same as identity. Identification is the outcome of the failure of identity, as defined as “the sameness of a person or thing at all times”. A person is always partially a reflection or copy of something else, having assimilated aspects of others.

Dr Hook said that as social subjects we are always entangled with others and never fully differentiable from those around us. Sometimes we are over inclusive when setting the boundaries of who we identify with, and at other times we tend to be over exclusive.

Freud identified three forms of identification. The first was the primitive form (or father-as-ideal). In this form the object wants to become the father. It is a loving form of identification, yet underscored by ambivalence as there is an implication that the child wants to replace the father, which introduces an element of competitiveness.

The second form of identification discussed by Freud is regressive identification. This form relates to a lost or failed love. The object wants something or someone, but can’t have them, so instead becomes like them, by assimilating their traits.

The third form is hysterical identification. In this case the process is driven by a desire to occupy a place, not to become another person. There is no emotional attachment to the person whose trait is being assimilated, and in fact there could be active antipathy towards that person. It is only the place occupied by them which is being sought.

In the second part of the lecture, Professor Jean-Marc Dewaele gave several clear examples of how people who are multilingual can create different identities for themselves in different languages.

The first example was of an American student called Alice. In the USA she distanced herself from classmates, and felt that she could not change her identity as defined by her class and social status. When she went to France, she used the opportunity to recreate herself, regularly organising parties in her dorm room, and creating an identity as an intellectual who was able to hold her own in philosophical discussions with her French friends, using “big long French words”.

A Finnish multilingual was able to pinpoint very specific personality traits which manifested themselves when he spoke different languages. Although in this case the multilingual was able to identify different traits coming to the fore when he spoke different languages, sometimes this is a more subtle difference. An interesting experiment with Spanish-English bilinguals showed that when asked to rank themselves on the ‘Big Five’ personality traits (openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism) the same participants gave different results, depending on which language they were asked in.

Another fascinating study with Greek-English bilinguals, told participants a story about Andy, or Andreas, depending on the language that the story was told in. Andy/Andreas had been neglecting his girlfriend and elderly mother because of pressures at work. The participants in the study were much more likely to be tolerant of Andy’s behaviour than of Andreas’s, showing that not only were they language switching, they were also switching between cultural frameworks.

Professor Dewaele ended by saying that multilingualism has been shown to have a positive effect on open-mindedness, cultural empathy and social initiative, and that he wishes that more governments would recognise the benefits that multilingualism can bring.