School of Psychology & Neuroscience

It has been a busy few months at the Simmons Lab.  

In August, Sarune Savickaite (PhD candidate at the lab) presented at the 43rd European Conference on Visual Perception (ECVP2021). Sarune discussed a pilot study on Animacy Perception in VR. After positive feedback during the conference, the talk was also presented at the Autism Journal Club and CSCAN rounds at the School of Psychology and Neuroscience here, in Glasgow.  

In September, Sarune attended womEncourage2021 conference organised by the Association for Computing Machinery and celebrating women in computer science. Sarune was also awarded a prestigious scholarship award to attend the conference. Sarune discussed the work at the lab, specifically, drawings tasks in VR, perceptual differences and other experiments conducted in lab.  

The Team at the Simmons Lab, including two PhD researchers (Elliot Millington and Sarune) have been invited to be guest editors on a special issue of Journal of Enabling Technologies on the Applications of Virtual Reality in Autism Research, which will be published September next year. 

In October, Sarune attended ISMAR2021, the leading international academic conference in the fields of Augmented Reality and Mixed Reality supported by the IEEE Computer Society, IEEE VGTC and ACM SIGGRAPH. Sarune did not present at the conference but has taken part in the Mentor/Mentee scheme, where she got to mentor three international researchers.  

A new blog post on stereovision in VR has been published at the Gist titled ‘Learning to run before we walk: can virtual reality recover stereovision?’ written by Sarune Savickaite. Previously Sarune has written a blog ‘Immersive Reality: history and current state of affairs’ for the Gist, which can be found here.  

Elliot Millington has joined the Learning Disability and Autism Team within the Mental Health and Social Care Directorate within the Scottish Government for a three-month placement, leading a project to improve the availability and comprehensiveness of data. 

Chapter by Sarune Savickaite and David Simmons has been accepted and is currently under review, to be published in January 2022. Chapter titled ‘From Abstract to Concrete: How Immersive Technology Allows more Effective Teaching of Complex Paradigms’ discusses how immersive technology can aid the teaching of abstract topics in developmental psychology. You can view a short video of the preliminary lesson set up here.  

In November, Sarune will present her work on animacy perception in VR at the Technology, Mind and Society conference organised by the American Psychological Association (APA).  

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First published: 1 November 2021