Lab Facilities
Our lab has two testing rooms, one for adult participants and
another for infant participants. The adult testing room is sound-attenuated
and contains an Eyelink II eye tracker, as well as a Mac and PC that are used for stimulus
presentation. The adult testing room also has sound recording equipment that can be used to record
speech for analysis or stimulus generation.
The infant testing room is set up for head-turn and habiutation
procedures and features a 52" plasma display and loudspeakers for stimulus presentation. The infant room
uses an ASL Remote Optics eye tracker and magnetic head sensor, allowing us to use eye-tracking methodoligies
to study perceptual development in infants. We also have an infant testing room equipped with a sound-attenuating booth located in the University of
Iowa Hospitals and Clinics that is used to study speech development in infants with cochlear implants.
In collaboration with the Dept. of Speech Pathology & Audiology, we also
have a mobile eye-tracking lab: a van that is equipped with the Eyelink eye-tracker and stimulus presentation
computers, allowing us to travel to other sites to conduct experiments. The mobile lab is used as part of our
work on language processing in special populations.
In addition, working
with other members of the Dept. of Psychology, we have facilities
to record EEGs for ERP experiments using a sound-attenuated and electrically-shielded recording chamber.
The lab also has a number of workstations that are used for various tasks. Workstations are eqiupped for
analyzing speech and making acoustic measurements. Workstations are also used to create synthetic speech using
KlattWorks and the Klatt speech synthesis engine, as well as design new experiments, analyze data,
create visual stimuli, and contact participants.