Julie Kirkby and her team of PhD students delivered an interesting lecture combined with demonstrations for which the audience participated.
Using eye-tracking technology as ‘a window to the mind’, this allowed us to see the developmental differences of children with and without 
dyslexia. It was interesting to know that when reading we only take in (fovea) around eight letters, whereas our peripheral vision (parafovea) can take in around 15 letters. There are also linguistic influences on our eye movements, such as how many letters, how often the word is read, and how much a word is expected. If comprehension breaks down then our eye movements are directed back to previously read text. Some, but not all, dyslexic people will have difficulty associating letters with speech sounds. Also, some will have ‘visual attention deficit’.
We had two demonstrations. The first was eye-linking to see where the eye looks when we’re reading. The second was the mobile (Dikablis) eye-tracker which demonstrates how we encode and produce information and how information can be forgotten in between. We were informed that it’s a myth that dyslexic children can’t copy from class boards. Reading ability affects the working memory and vice versa. There was a lot of great research shared and it was an engaging afternoon.
If you are interested in this then you may be interested in similar events going on tomorrow. These include Media literacy in secondary schools taking place at 12.30pm and Third space digital learning in Dorset schools taking place at 3.30pm.
Prosopagnosia, or face blindness, refers to a severe deficit in recognizing familiar people from their face. The condition affects people in different ways with some experiencing difficulties in the recognition of faces and others experiencing problems recognising other things, such as objects, cars, or animals, as well as faces. Many of those people diagnosed with prosopagnosia report difficulties in other aspects of face processing, such as judging age or gender, and the majority report navigational difficulties. 
Sarah is also interested in whether face blindness is hereditary and physiological rather than psychological. She is colaborating with genetics researchers to test families of prosopagnosics and examine any links. The research is ongoing, but initial findings suggest prosopagnia is hereditry, but not always. Sarah’s research aims to identify the sub-types and various causes of prosopagnia, and to improve public understanding of the condition, as well as increasing the early diagnosis of the condition in children.
New weight change BU paper
One week to go! | The 16th Annual Postgraduate Research Conference
Geography and Environmental Studies academics – would you like to get more involved in preparing our next REF submission?
Congratulations to three former BU staff
MSCA Staff Exchanges 2024 Call – internal deadline
Applications are now open for 2025 ESRC Postdoctoral Fellowships!
Horizon Europe – ERC CoG and MSCA SE webinars
MaGMap: Mass Grave Mapping
ERC grants – series of webinars