Visit to McMaster

We had a very interesting visit to McMaster on Friday. We were hosted by Daphne Maurer and Terri Lewis who are conducting video gaming training studies with amblyopes. They hope to be able to replace some of the current tedious training tasks to improve vision in adult amblyopes with more interesting and engaging video games that can be played at home, rather than have the patient come to a clinic or lab.

We also visited Judy Shedden's lab and had a very enjoyable discussion with Judy and Scott Watter and some of their students (Jim, Patrick, and Michelle). They have several experiments in progress, or planned, and it will be interesting to see how they turn out. Judy is an expert in ERP methods and has started to look at the differences between gamers and non-gamers using that tool. Then we toured Hong-Jin Sun's lab and met with his group who are doing work on spatial cognition. One of their lines of research uses a DriveSafety driving simulator and they can measure UFOV during the driving task. Jing had a go in the simulator and ran into the back of a police car. Women drivers ;-) ;-)

We ended our visit by giving a talk ("Sex, lies, and videogames") on our research at Toronto. We described the recent work done by Sijing, Alina, Jing, and Jessica. The talk seemed to be well received and we got many questions during and after the talk.

It was a good way to spend a Friday and it will be great to go back again sometime soon to hear how the video game research at McMaster is progressing. It was great to be in a department where so many people are doing cutting edge research in perception!