Detecting Attention
I learned a lot of lessions during my PhD and I would love to continue studying certain aspects of attention. In particular:
- The LED slowly changing in the peripheral vision has promise as a measure of focus; other researchers are interested in it. It would be great to advance this with (1) tracking pupil motion and estimating the location of the light in the visual field, and (2) tracking external lighting and adapting the brightness to keep constant visual contrast with the background light.
- The vibrating your leg slowly-- it turns out the strap can be uncomfortable, it's difficult to have a consistent and low threshold vibration, and leg sensitivity changes dramatically depending on placement. Lots of challenges to overcome with this idea of tapping someone to see if they are focused.
- Time perception. Perhaps one of the most facinating topics, I would love to build a new, better model of time perception, and really understand how we perceive it. I think that people have a meta-awareness of the time-- whether they need to know what time it is-- and perceive time largely in relation to moments during the day that are scheduled. This has never been studied. If we can build and prove some aspects of how people perceive time, we can also measure how their perception is manipulated, and/or infer something about their experience when their experience differs from our model's prediction.
- I could use more data on people wearing some of my wearables while trying to focus, and wouldn't mind help collecting new data.
- There are fascinating things to explore here about how and when we lose ourselves in an activity, what causes us to become self-aware after existing in that state, and how we might design for/interact with it.