About

The Story so Far

Hello ! My name is Hayward Godwin, and I’m a Post-doctoral Research Fellow at the University of Southampton. My research focuses on visual cognition, and in particular, visual search.

I finished my undergraduate degree in 2005 and began my PhD immediately after, which lasted until 2008. After that time, I’ve been working on a variety of projects relating to visual cognition, visual search, and various forms of eye-tracking. Over the years, I’ve been successful in receiving funding from the EPSRC, QinetiQ, the UK Department for Transport, DSTL and the ESRC. Much of my work has had an applied component to it, and examining real-world, applied tasks has made me very interested in understanding visual cognition in complex and very difficult tasks, which, despite their difficulty, need to be completed efficiently by many people on a regular basis.

Current and Upcoming Projects

I’ve just begun working on a 4-year ESRC grant examining visual search in 3D and transparent displays, and am hoping to begin data collection soon, once the 3D displays have been created and tested in detail.

I’ve also begun to get engaged with a number of interdisciplinary projects, working on research projects with artists, ship scientists and archaeologists.

Finally, I’ve been working on various projects for DSTL examining search behaviour and performance in complex tasks and environments.

Collaborators and Colleagues

Just a quick list of some of the people who I have worked with to date:

Programming and Technology

I have plenty of experience with various methods for creating stimuli, collecting data, and then analysing results. Here’s a quick summary.

Data Collection: Presentation, Experiment Builder, Matlab, E-prime

Data Analysis: R, SPSS

Equipment : Eyelink 1000, various head-mounted eye trackers

Other languages and software: Python, C#/.net, PHP, MySQL/SQLite, plus web-based stuff (HTML, CSS, Javascript with a dash of JQuery)

Teaching

Just a brief list of my teaching experience to date:

  • I assist in the supervision of third-year undergraduate project students. This includes assistance with experimental design, training in the use of the experimental software, programming, data analysis, and other ad-hoc requirements as they arise.
  • I have provided training/teaching to others in the use of various forms of programming and technology to aid in their research and experimental design, programming, analysis and write-up. This includes members of staff, post-docs, postgraduates and undergraduates.
  • In 2011-2012, I created a training course and gave lectures/workshops for staff, postgraduates and post-docs covering the use of Experiment Builder, for creating experiments, Data Viewer, for examining eye-tracking data, and the Eyelink 1000, for collecting eye-tracking data.
  • I’ve taught on the following courses:
    • The first-year Introduction to Psychology course (2009)
    • The first-year Statistics courses running in the first and second semester of each year (2010, 2011, 2012, and as a workshop tutor in 2008)
    • The second-year Statistics course (2011)
    • The second-year Perception course (2009)
    • The first-year Thinking Psychologically course (2010)
    • The third-year Eye Movements and Visual Cognition course (2010, 2011)
I’ve also started uploading video guides to my YouTube channel. Most of these were for students, but some are for programming.