RESEARCH INTERESTS

Keywords

vision, vestibular system, eye and head movements, control systems, neurophysiology, perception of motion, psychophysics, multi-sensory interactions

Summary

I am interested in the general question of how we see during movement. As well as being an interesting an important question in its own right, this question represents an approachable and answerable version of the broader but unanswerable question "how does the brain work". The principles clarified by solving the question of how the brain sees during movement are the principles of brain processing in general. It is important to understand how the brain processes information as we move around since we are almost always moving around.

Laboratories

The Harris lab constists of the three interlocking parts:

• Eye Movement Lab
• Spatial Localization Lab
• Perception of Self Motion Lab

• recording eye movements during various patterns of motion in order to reveal coding mechanisms within the brain.
• measuring the perception of vision, space and hearing during movement. Variations in sensory sensitivity can be most revealing about the principles of coding underlying them.
• measuring the perception of self motion while moving around an immersive (virtual reality) environment.  This project is done in collaboration with Michael Jenkin. Some of the hardware can be seen here.
• investigating the effect of microgravity on perception
• investigating the relative roles of the different senses to the perception of motion

• Conrad Wall (Jenks Vestibular Lab, MEEI, MIT/Harvard). Our latest work has discovered  non-linearities in visual-vestibular interactions revealed by recording eye movementes evoked by combinations of  different frequency of movement presented simultaneously to the two systems.
• Michael Jenkin (Computer Science, York University). We are using virtual reality techniques to investigate the perception of self motion.
• Heinrich Bülthoff(Tübingen), Chuck Oman (Man-Vehicle Lab MIT)  and Alain Berthoz (CNRS Paris). Michael Jenkin and I are planning a collaborative study with these three groups looking at navigation in immersive environments. (Funding will be requested from an NSERC collaborative opportunity)
•  Chuck Oman (Man-Vehicle Lab MIT) and Alain Berthoz (CNRS Paris).Michael Jenkin and I are planning a collaborative study with these two groups looking at navigation and perception in space. (Funding will be requested from the Canadian Space Agency).
• Andy Smith (Psychology, Royal Holloway College, London Univ, UK). We investigate the relatiohsip between eye movements and perception for complex motion patterns. Our latest paper on the eye movements evoked by second-order motion has just been accepted for publication in Experimental Brain Research.
• Michael Fetter On my sabbatical this year (1999/2000), I will be visiting Tübingen, Germany and working on the representation of 3D rotation of humans.

Engineering applications

• designing human/machine interfaces for controlling remote robotic systems (eg. to explore dangerous areas)
• improving virtual reality systems
• improving flight and driving simulator design

• dealing with the disorienting consequences of paralysis or unexpected loss of movement control
• dealing with sensory loss -- blindness, deafness or vestibular loss

• motion sickness, space sickness and cybersickness often result because of the failure to understand exactly what causes these debilitating and dangerous feelings.
• virtual reality design
• man/machine interface design
• orientation in micro-gravity. As well as often suffering space sickness, astronauts frequently get disoriented and have difficulty finding their way around even quite small environments. Mistakes in navigation within the international space station or in  Mars-bound capsule could be costly.

driving strategies and driving simulator design