Research Facilities
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Overview
The Department of Psychology research space, faculty and graduate student offices, and general classroom spaces are all located on the 3rd, 4th, and 5th floors of Fawcett Hall. 20,000 square feet is specifically reserved for psychology research. General laboratories, including four Mac Labs, support both undergraduate and graduate students. Other general-purpose facilities for individual and small group testing include audio-visual equipment for taping or presenting information to groups, observation rooms with one-way windows, and laptop computers for field research. The department also has access to high-performance computing through Microsoft Azure, Mindmodeling.org, and the State of Ohio Supercomputing Center.
Each faculty member also maintains a research laboratory. Specialized equipment in these research laboratories supports research on the sensory process, motor control, spatial orientation, human-computer interaction, display design, flight simulation, memory, aging, expertise, teamwork, assessment, training, and stress in the workplace.
Many specialized laboratories around the Dayton Metropolitan area allow us to use their facilities and equipment. Wright State University and the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base have an official Educational Partnership Agreement that facilitates the sharing of equipment, facilities, and personnel. Specialized high fidelity simulators and other test facilities are available and have been used by our faculty and students. In addition, we have excellent working relationships with other laboratories and facilities including area corporations and industries.
Eye-Tracking
The Department of Psychology maintains two video-based eye-tracking systems, both Eyelink®1000 trackers. These eye trackers can be used with a tower mount which includes a head & chin support or they can be used in a head-free mode to measure either monocular or binocular eye movements. These systems measure eye position with a temporal sample rate of up to 2000 Hz, with a typical spatial error of less than 0.25° of visual angle.
EEG
Dr. Assaf Harel’s Human Neuroscience and Visual Cognition Laboratory at Wright State University located within Wright State University’s (WSU) Department of Psychology. The lab offers a suite of three experimental testing rooms, including an EMI-shielded room (USC-26 Radio Frequency Enclosure, Universal Shielding Corp., Deer Park, NY) designated for EEG recordings. The lab has a 64-active channel EEG system (BioSemi, Amsterdam, Netherlands) connected to two dedicated computers designated for stimulus delivery and data acquisition. The lab also houses several networked computers accessible for offline data analysis, including a specialized state of the art software for EEG and fMRI data analysis.
VERITAS
The Virtual Environment Research, Interactive Technology, And Simulation (VERITAS) facility is owned and operated by the Wright State University Department of Psychology and housed at AFRL. The facility supports basic and applied scientific research on sensory systems, aviation, teleconferencing, telerobotics, and virtual environments. The central component of the facility is a CAVE®, a room-sized virtual environment presentation system controlled by a cluster of Windows-based computers. High-performance projectors display stereoscopic images on the 10’ by 10’ rear-projected screens that make up the four walls and the front-projected floor of the CAVE®. Inside the CAVE® stereoscopic glasses and headphones, and the high-resolution, 360° 3-D video and audio displays put you in the pilot’s seat of a General Aviation aircraft, flying over a mountainous landscape, a dense urban environment, navigating to a downed pilot, or inside an intensive care unit, tending to a simulated patient.
