Resources
Institutional and Departmental Resources
In addition to the fully equipped laboratories of the program training faculty, Indiana University-Bloomington and the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Cognitive Science Program, the School of Optometry and the Program in Neuroscience provide outstanding support of research and training. These include a technical support staff within each department that are available for all researchers, and research projects.
The School of Optometry and The Borish Center for Ophthalmic Research (BCOR) provides an interdisciplinary environment on important questions related to visual science, visual disorders, ocular pathologies, and systemic diseases that affect the eye and its adnexa. This facility includes the latest equipment for clinical research as well as a large database of subjects who are interested in participating in clinical research. The staff is experienced in large-scale clinical trials and has an excellent record in subject recruitment and retention.
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Imaging Resource Facility IUB - The Imaging Research Facility (IRF) is located centrally on campus, in the Psychology building, where Psychological & Brain Sciences resides. It is considered state-of-the-art for neuroimaging technology, and is dedicated 100% for research use. The facility is administered by Dr. Aina Puce. In addition, Drs. Karin James and Sharlene Newman, core faculty on this training grant, are core faculty users of the IRF who are given priority in terms of scheduling imaging time. Recently, the IRF acquired an MRI-safe EEG system, enabling simultaneous EEG and functional MRI studies to be performed. To assist researchers, the IRF employs a full-time MR physicist and two full-time MR operators.
Multi-sensory Measurement - The developmental labs in the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department are equipped with advanced multisensory measurement equipment including eye-tracking, head cameras and motion sensors.
Computing Services - IU Bloomington is widely recognized as among the best in the nation for the support of both research and teaching. These include voice and video data communication resources; massive data storage and supercomputing resources; high-speed network access; a facility with support staff for the Advanced Visualization Lab. Funded in part by the NSF, the visualization facility enables researchers to analyze and conceptualize data in new ways. Another useful resource is IUs CAVE. This Virtual Reality technology enables research to simulate 3-dimensional environments and to carefully manipulate relations between action and perception. In addition the facility also enables researchers to visualize and manipulate data in complex ways.
Robotic Laboratory - This is a shared facility of the Cognitive Science Program. It houses two research labs, a teaching lab, a workshop and a conference room. The lab contains a variety of robotic platforms, including a Robomotio Reddy upper-torso humanoid, a Segway RMP 200 dynamically stable autonomous platform, an Active Media Pioneer P3AT, a Sony AIBO, a Hitech Robonova-1, CMU Cams on pan/tilt heads, and a locally fabricated mechanical vocal tract, a hexapod walker and manipulators. The laboratory also includes a variety of robotic platforms for educational purposes, including UGobe Pleos, Bioloid Robotic Kits, and Vex Robotic Design Systems kits. The workshop includes basic mechanical and electronic fabrication facilities, including a tabletop mill and lathe. There are also eight 3.0 GHz Mac Pros in the teaching lab that are configured to run as an Xgrid cluster. This provides a cluster with 40 compute nodes that are used to run evolutionary algorithm simulations whenever the teaching lab is not in use.
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Laboratory Resources
The individual laboratories of the training faculty are fully equipped with up-to-date computing, video-recording, audio-recording, and instrumentation pertinent to the research focus of the laboratory, and also state-of-the art and powerful computing equipment and software relevant to modeling, data analysis, and data-mining. Listed below are the more major equipment and procedures available to the trainees and a link to the faculty lab that utilizes these resources.
Measuring movement in real time, in 3-d:
Bingham Lab (Optotrack)
Bingham, Smith, Yu Labs (Polthemus motion sensors-have been embedded in fingerless gloves and headbands for easy use with toddlers)
Virtual reality:
Bingham Lab (Ascension Flock of Birds system)
Infant habituation and preferential looking:
Candy, Busey, S. Jones, Smith and James Labs
Eye tracking (both remote and head-mounted):
Smith, Yu, Busey, Bingham, M. Jones and Candy Labs
Video-recording:
Smith, Yu, and James Labs
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