Sandra is interested in how people turn the huge amount of visual information around them into some form of impression, belief or judgement, and in the reasons why and how this sometimes goes wrong. As part of the European Project SPEEDD, she is working on visual information sampling and information integration for two applied use cases: road traffic management and credit card fraud. At present this involves eye tracking and the development of efficient analysis protocols in Matlab including novel analysis approaches and metrics, development of interactive applications that integrate with eye tracking hardware, design of lab experiments and data collection ‘in the field’. This unites with her group’s work on Ergonomics, Decision Modeling, UI design and event recognition. For a list of publications coming out of this work, please check the ‘Publications’ section (currently several conference contributions accepted/presented and a paper under review).
At the side, Sandra is interested in perceptual learning, with experiments in the domain of movement feature recognition. At present this includes the investigation of different delivery methods on detection performance based on her animation-based learning tool ‘LamenessTrainer’. Remaining very interested in biomechanics, she is also currently working on motor control and biomechanics of tool use with Chris Baber and biomechanics of equine locomotion with Hilary Clayton. The outcomes of this work can also be found in the ‘Publications’ section.
During her PhD, Sandra worked on early recognition of ‘lameness’ in horses, a health complaint which manifests in a limping movement. Being able to decide on the content and direction of her PhD, she made the case for performing eye tracking studies, including a successful grant application to cover equipment costs. She hence combined biomechanics research to quantify movement adaptations of horses in various conditions as well as eye tracking research and perceptual studies to quantify what humans do to spot lameness, and what limitations the human eye meets. Her work in biomechanics included the development of Matlab routines for automatic processing and display of movement sensor data, which she then applied to clinical scenarios such as horse’s movement after flexion tests, on the circle or following diagnostic analgesia. Her work on perception covered visual scan patterns and decisions of students and experts when examining horses for lameness, detection thresholds for perceiving movement asymmetry in novices and experts, bias introduced by prior knowledge to the decision process of experts and novices and intuitive feature selection during movement assessment in novices.