Sprach- und literaturwissenschaftliche Fakultät - Psycholinguistics

Laboratory

 

PI: Prof. Dr. P. Knoeferle

Technician: Carsten Schliewe

Phone: (030) 2093-9676

Mail: psychlabsg@gmail.com (for taking part in experiments)

 

Internship, or an empirical Master's thesis: Email

 

Eye-tracking laboratory video and protocol

 

Laboratory protocol (March, 2020, non-PEER-REVIEWED, CC-BY license)

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.

Central Lab Facilities of the Faculty of Language, Literature, and the Humanities:

see the Website

 

Psycholinguistics Eye-tracking and EEG Lab

IMG 1428aEEG Laboratory

In psycholinguistics, we use EEG to measure event-related brain potentials (ERPs). An ERP is the measured brain response (amplitude in µV) to a specific stimulus (e.g., a word, or an object displayed on a computer screen) or a sequence of stimuli (e.g., several words in a sentence). By placing electrodes on the scalp, we can measure the stimulus-related electrical activity of the brain over time with high temporal resolution. ERPs are a non-invasive method and their high degree of temporal precision permits us to determine what functional cognitive processes are affected by a specific stimulus in real time.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

IMG 1369aEye-tracking Laboratory

Modern eye-tracking technology permits us to measure a language user’s eye movements as they inspect images and listen to sentences or as they read sentences. From the gaze record we can gain insight into a language user’s locus of attention, but also into her expectations, difficulties, and response to contextual cues during language processing. Our laboratory has state-of-the-art eye-trackers (SR Research Eyelink 1000, SMI Red 300, Pupil Lab).

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Reaction time measurements

Language processing and other cognitive tasks take time. It is postulated, that processes with higher cognitive demand also take longer time. We can measure, for example, how long it takes to process specific sentences or words. Participants are looking at a screen, from which they receive linguistic input - they are then asked to react to specific tasks by pressing buttons on a button box. While this sort of response is not continuous, it can nonetheless complement the eye-tracking and ERP data and enrich our insight into cognitive processes.

 

Computing infrastructure
  • We use state-of-the-art PC and Mac computers for preparing and analysing our eye-tracking and ERP data. Data storage is supported by HU file servers (check with Mr. Schliewe for precise naming). The infrastructure supports access to software (e.g., for audio- and video-file processing) and online corpora.

 

Data analysis and ethics

 

 

Participants

We are always looking for participants for our research projects.

If you are interested or have any questions relating to our experiments, please send an email to psychlabsg@gmail.com or check for free time slots at https://lingex.zas.gwz-berlin.de/public/
You need to register to use that service. If you do not want to get an account, you can still send us an email and we can arrange an individual date.