Dr Eugene McSorley was appointed as a Lecturer at University of Reading in 2004 and promoted to Senior Lecturer (Associate Professor) in 2011. His research is primarily in the area of Active Vision. This stems from the fundamental idea that in order to fully understand how we see the world around us we must consider vision in terms of the things we do, the actions we take. We do not passively process our environment in order to then act upon it rather we actively interact with our visual environment and interrogate it by moving our eyes to explore it. This has dramatic effects on how we perceive.
Work in the lab concentrates on understanding the links between vision and action: what are the active processes which underlie vision and action selection? What can this tell us about how we process visual information and operate in our visual environments? We do this, primarily, by examining people’s eye movements as they select a target from a number of other potential targets. This can be in situations as diverse as Consumer Behaviour, examining Art or the exploration of basic visual displays. We have a number of eye trackers which can
Target selection processes involve the dynamic interaction of external information and internal goal states. It involves the use of vision and visual attention; perceptual choice and decision making (neuroeconomics); emotions and aesthetics; memory; and show effects of age and nutrition. We are currently involved in a number of projects exploring the impact of these.