Hunter Walatka and Lauren Garner traveled to Denver, CO to present research at the 66th Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society.

Lauren (below) presented a poster on intraindividual variability, or within-person inconsistencies, in cognitive performance. There are multiple ways to compute measures of intraindividual variability, but none were particularly reliable, which indicated that people are either not consistently inconsistent, or that the study did not have enough trials to sufficiently evaluate inconsistency as a cognitive construct.

Hunter's (above) presentation was on the effect of a brief binaural beats intervention on working memory performance. He found a inconclusive result, with alpha binaural beats improving visual working memory, but not visual-spatial working memory. Overall this means the results were somewhat inconclusive!

Matt presented a novel study on how receiving feedback improves memory in a long-term memory task. When people are alerted if they correctly remember a word, or incorrectly remember a word (or repeat a word they've already remembered), memory performance improves compared to those that don't receive feedback during the task.

Stephen presented a poster on how responses to a media multitasking questionnaire relate to attention control and other cognitive constructs like working memory or fluid intelligence. Overall, people's media multitasking did not relate to cognitive performance.

Lauren presented a poster investigating how general and specific cognitive abilities, personality, and physical health as measured by activity levels recorded on a Fitbit might predict performance in college. She found that general cognitive ability did not predict academic performance, but the specific abilities for long-term memory and fluid intelligence each predicted about 4% of the variance in academic performance after accounting for all other variables.

The CAM Lab visited the Glendalough Valley in the Wicklow Mountains National Park, taking advantage of the Irish landscape while on site for the conference.

Jeffrey F. Rhoads, vice president for research and professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering, said, “Notre Dame Research is proud of our research relationship with Notre Dame Athletics. Through this collaborative partnership, Notre Dame will officially connect the lab to the playing field for the first time ever. We are excited to witness the potential of what it means to marry Notre Dame’s research excellence with its long-standing preeminence in Athletics — all for the good of our collective well-being.”

“We congratulate the researchers and practitioners who, through these projects, will help athletes train effectively, cope with difficult conditions, and perform safely,” said John P. Wagle, the Pat & Jana Eilers Sr. Associate Athletics Director for Sports Performance. “We look forward not just to these results but also to our continued collaboration with Notre Dame Research and the role it will have in fostering high performance and overall well-being, both at Notre Dame and beyond.”

The 2025 awardees of the Human Performance & Wellness Research Grant are below.

Helping athletes return after ACL injuries

Edgar Bolívar-Nieto, assistant professor in the Department of Aerospace and Mechanical Engineering and principal investigator at the Wearable Robotics Laboratory, will lead a project titled “Towards Functional Return-to-Sport Assessment after Anterior-Cruciate-Ligament Reconstruction: A Wearable Framework to Estimate Muscle Strength.” He will be joined by co-principal investigator Mandy Merritt, DPT, the senior associate athletic trainer and physical therapist for the Notre Dame Men’s Lacrosse Team.

Bolívar-Nieto and Merritt will work to develop an instrumented functional test to help determine when an athlete who has suffered an anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) injury is ready to return to their sport. ACL injuries are common in young athletes. Although ACL surgeries can be effective, about 20% of athletes who experience a torn ACL reinjure the same or opposite knee. Better measures of an athlete's readiness to return will reduce the risk of repeated injury and ensure athletes are able to perform effectively and safely.

Reducing the “sports travel disadvantage”

Gerald Haeffel and Ivan Vargas will lead a project titled “The Sports Travel Disadvantage: Untangling the Effects of Circadian Rhythm Disruption and Sleep Loss on Athletic and Cognitive Performance.” Haeffel, an associate professor in the Department of Psychology, leads the Cognition & Emotion Lab, and Vargas, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, leads the Sleep and Health Research Lab. Haeffel and Vargas will be joined by co-principal investigators Matthew Robison, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, and Carlie McGregor, a staff psychologist in the University Counseling Center and Notre Dame Athletics.

The researchers will explore the “travel disadvantage” — the well-documented phenomenon that teams that travel across multiple time zones before a competition are about 20% less likely to win than teams that do not have to travel. This disadvantage holds true regardless of the direction the team travels or what sport the team plays. By exploring the underlying causes related to sleep and circadian rhythm, the researchers will identify the best ways to intervene and enable teams to compete at their best, even when traveling long distances.

Building stress-resilience in student-athletes

Zhi Zheng, an assistant professor in the Department of Electrical Engineering, will lead a project titled “Smart Textile Sensors for Mental Stress Sensing During Daily Activities.” She will work with Yiyu Shi, a professor in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, and Ying (“Alison”) Cheng, a professor in the Department of Psychology and Associate Director of the Lucy Family Institute for Data and Society.

Their project looks at mental stress, a significant challenge for college students as they encounter new academic responsibilities, unfamiliar social dynamics, and heightened expectations. The problem is especially difficult for college athletes, who face the additional pressure of athletic commitments. The research team will develop smart textile sensors to detect mental stress as students go about their daily activities. The textile sensors will detect electrodermal activity. Unlike existing sensors, they will be discreet, integrated into socks and other clothing, and they will use advanced AI computations modeling to overcome the signal challenges that arise due to movement. The researchers’ goal is to help students become more aware of stress, improve how they adapt to it, and ultimately support both their performance and mental health.

In addition to the outcomes within the award period, the grants will also serve as seed funding to generate preliminary results for larger, external grants.

To learn more about the ways Notre Dame Research is partnering with Notre Dame Athletics to provide new facilities, infrastructure, and funding to explore the science of elite performance, contact sportsperformance@nd.edu or athleticsresearch-list@nd.edu.

Contact: Brandi Wampler, associate director of media relations, 574-631-2632, brandiwampler@nd.edu

Originally published by Brett Beasley at research.nd.edu on April 22, 2025.

“His most remarkable natural gift ... is his vision,” McPhee observed. “During a game, Bradley’s eyes are always a glaze of panoptic attention.”

The work of University of Notre Dame researcher Matthew Robison suggests that McPhee may have been on to something. In a recent study supported by the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory and the Army Research Institute, Robison documented a phenomenon in eye movement — or “oculomotor dynamics” — that links a steady, focused gaze with superior levels of performance.

Robison, an assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, made the discovery thanks to the unique capabilities of his lab, which includes more than a dozen precision instruments for tracking eye movement and pupil dilation. These devices capture images of the eyes every four milliseconds, providing 250 frames per second.

This ultra-detailed look at the eyes allows Robison to “read” the complex language of minute eye movement. A slight wiggle in the eye, for example, can reveal that a study participant was distracted by a stimulus entering their field of vision — even though their facial expression never altered. Or a dilation of the pupil might indicate a participant is struggling to solve a complex math problem.

Recently, though, Robison has been most interested not in why our eyes move, but in why we might — or might want to — keep them still. He was inspired to investigate the meaning of a steady gaze by the work of applied sports psychologists helping athletes achieve high levels of performance.

“Sports psychologists regularly advise that if you're about to putt, pick a spot on the back of the golf ball and keep your eyes still there for a second or two. Then hit the ball,” Robison said. “Or, if you’re shooting a free throw in basketball, pick a spot on the rim and focus on it for a few seconds. Then shoot the free throw. The advice seems sound in many cases. But the causal pathway behind this phenomenon has not been thoroughly demonstrated or explained.”

Robison hypothesized that a steady gaze had to do with attention control and thus would lead to better performance not only in sports but also in almost any mentally demanding activity, whether it was comprehending a difficult passage of text, solving a complex problem, remembering new information or multitasking. To test his hypothesis, he recruited nearly 400 participants to perform a series of tasks in his lab over a two-hour period while their gaze was being recorded by eye trackers and pupilometers.

Robison found that, across the board, those participants who kept their gaze steady in the moments just before being called upon to complete a task performed with greater speed and with greater accuracy. Borrowing a term from sports psychologist Joan Vickers, Robison called this specific quality of gaze “quiet eye.” He said it is more than a lack of motion. Like Bradley’s gaze that so impressed McPhee, “quiet” eyes are not just still. They are focused — able to resist distractions and remain vigilant, ready and “awake.”

His work documenting quiet eye suggested another question for Robison to explore: Would it be possible to train individuals to perform better by training them not in the task itself but in developing a steadier gaze?

Thanks to new funding from the Office of Naval Research (ONR), Robison launched a new three-year project focused on answering that question. The funding is part of the ONR’s Young Investigator Award program, and Robison is one of just 25 awardees of the program over the past year. The funding will allow Robison to test new ways to train one’s gaze and to determine how far the effects of “quiet eye” reach.

“Our aim is to make the benefits of ‘quiet eye’ available to anyone who wants to learn them,” he said.

And while it will not immediately lead to Bill Bradley levels of basketball virtuosity, the benefits could be widespread. Robison hopes that “those who learn this skill are able, in turn, to sustain and control their attention, which will yield benefits for their performance in almost any complex or demanding task.”

Natalie Steinhauser, a program officer at the Office of Naval Research, said she looks forward to starting this new research that bridges two aspects of her Prepared Warfighter Portfolio. Her portfolio focuses on “understanding attention control and how it impacts warfighter performance” and “accelerating and innovating training approaches to maximize warfighter readiness.” This research, she said “brings those worlds together in hopes of training our naval warfighters to optimize their attention and, thus, performance.”

Robison’s research is one instance in a broad effort by Notre Dame researchers to explore the science of elite performance. To advance this effort, Notre Dame Research is partnering with Notre Dame Athletics to provide new facilities, infrastructure and funding. To learn more, contact sportsperformance@nd.edu or athleticsresearch-list@nd.edu.

Originally published by Brett Beasley at research.nd.edu on March 24.

Contact: Tracy DeStazio, associate director of media relations, 574-631-9958 or tdestazi@nd.edu