Research Seminars 2010/11

Vision Science and its Clinical Applications

 All rooms with the C prefix are in the Tait Building, City University, Northampton Square.

For enquiries please contact Simona Wade on (020) 7040 8331

Abstracts

26 November 2010
Professor David Thomson, City University

Harnassing new technology to improve clinical vision assessment and screening

Over the past few decades there have been major advances in the methodology available to assess various aspects of visual function. The research literature is laden with examples of tests that have been shown to provide valuable information about the integrity of the visual system, yet very few of these tests have found their way into clinical practice. Indeed, until recently most clinicians have had a remarkably small armoury of tests available for assessing visual function.

However, recent developments in computer and display technology have opened up exciting new opportunities for clinical vision assessment and screening. In this talk, David Thomson will briefly review a range of computer-based tools that have made a significant impact on clinical practice.He will then describe a radical new computer-based system for screening in schools. School nurses, equipped with internet-enabled iPads, can use the software to perform a variety of tests including vision and hearing screening and the measurement of height and weight.  The results of these tests are automatically transmitted to a secure central server in the "cloud".  Software has been written to automatically analyse the results and generate customised reports for parents and audit reports for Primary Care Trusts. The new system has been shown to be sensitive and specific and to provide an extremely cost effective solution for managing a screening program. The software will be launched next spring and marketed by a University spin-out company, EHealth-Screening.

Wedge® optics development

The wedge optics technology enables among others to implement projection, imaging and interactive systems as compact quasi planar objects. The technology was invented by A.Travis and developed under the CamFPD banner before being acquired by Microsoft. This short presentation will describe the light guide technology, its applications and the contributions I made towards its development during my employment in 2004-2007 (Material characterisation (scattering), distortion correction and interactive display prototyping).

Individual Differences in Eye Movements:  The PERGENIC test battery

The PERGENIC test battery consisted of a number of perceptual and oculomotor tests, designed to investigate individual differences and their genetic basis. Over one thousand participants were tested, with 10% of this sample being tested twice on separate sessions to assess the test-retest reliability of each measure. This talk will focus on the oculomotor measures obtained from standard smooth pursuit and pro- and anti-saccade tasks. The range and test-retest reliability of each measure will be reported along with the correlations between them. Stable individual differences were observed, as 1 week test-retest reliabilities for all measures were high. A genome-wide association study is currently being carried out to investigate whether the individual differences reported have a genetic basis.

Two heads are better than one². This adage cogently summarises the universally held dogma that difficult decisions are better made collectively than by isolated individuals. In my talk I will examine this idea using a paradigm based on signal detection theory applied to collective decision making in a simple perceptual task. I will delineate some of the cognitive and biological conditions in which collaboration fails to outperform individual perceptual sensitivity and will exploit these conditions to make inferences about the information content of interpersonal communications that takes place en route to arriving at a collective decision. I will conclude that this content is best described as the isolated observers¹ metacognitive grasp of his conscious perceptual experience.