From 9 am to 5 pm, May 15th 2018, the Language Cognitive Lab of School of International Studies and Beijing ISEN Technology & Trade Co., Ltd. jointly held a seminar on eye-tracking techniques in language studies for students and teachers of SIS in Room 118, Building East 6. Dr. Sam Hutton, a scientist in Europe for the Canada SR Research Ltd. and a scholar from University of Sussex, who has spent more than 20 years studying the visual cognition, was invited to give a lecture, with Prof. Wang Xiaolu, Director of the Language Cognitive Lab as the host.
Human beings have been tirelessly figuring out how eyes and languages see through and reflect the human mind. The eye tracker is an important device to track the position of the eyeball and measure the information of eye movement. It is used to record the features of eye movement while the visual information is being processed, namely, to study the mental activity by examining the eye movement. Applying eye movement to language research provides a scientific approach to exploring deep cognitive processing of brain languages. A large number of students and teachers interested in language visual processing from universities and research institutes attended this seminar, including many professors of SIS such as Prof. He Lianzhen specializing in language testing, Prof. Wang Xiaolu in neurolinguistics, Associate Prof. Yue Ming in corpus linguistics, Associate Prof. Xu Zhiyuan in metaphor study and their teams, which showed greater importance to visual language processing.
Students and teachers listen attentively at the seminar
Dr. Hutton outlined the history of eye-movement research and its equipment evolution, as well as the specific fields involved in eye-movement language research. He also explained the key parameters in the research and demonstrated the operation of eye tracker. Besides, he shared the challenges and experience he had during the 20 years’ research with the audience and provided the most effective solutions. All the students and teachers have gained a lot and spoke highly of the lecture.
Dr. Hutton shared his operating experience of the eye tracker with the audience
The eye movement research provides us with an effective approach to psycholinguistics and cognitive psychology. Taking advantage of this seminar, our laboratory will present more academic feasts in the hope of making contribution to language research in China.
Language Cognitive Laboratory of School of International Studies
May 16, 2018
Translated by Li Qian, Zhan Bingbing
Edited by Xu Xueying
