Research Assistant - Child Development Eye-tracking Project

[Kirsten Abbot-Smith]

The new Kent Child Development Unit (www.kent.ac.uk/psychology/
childdevelopmentunit ) has a position for a research assistant on
£24,877 - £28,839 per annum, at 60% of full-time pro rata for 1 year
and 9 months, starting 2nd August 2010.

To apply for this post you have to complete an application form via
the University of Kent's online recruitment process on www.kent.ac.uk/jobs.
The deadline is 20th June and interviews will be held on 1st July.

The project is entitled "the role of the agent in sentence
comprehension by preschool children" and funded by an ESRC grant to
Dr. Kirsten Abbot-Smith (University of Kent), Dr. Caroline Rowland
(University of Liverpool) and Prof. Julian Pine (University of
Liverpool).

The main purpose of this role is, firstly, to programme and maintain
the E-Prime 2.0, touch-screen, and Tobii X120 eye-tracker calibration,
eye-tracking and analysis programmes necessary for carrying out eye-
tracking experiments on both 24 months old and 42 months old as part
of a study looking at how children learn to understand the meanings of
sentences. Secondly, the position also requires the researcher to
create the visual and audio stimuli using video and audio-editing
programmes such as Adobe Premiere Pro CS4. Lastly, the children will
be tested at the Kent Child Development Unit at the University of Kent
in the presence of their parents. The testing procedure includes
encouraging the children to point at the video clip which matches what
they hear. Therefore, experience in working with young pre-school age
children would be desirable.

Key Duties
To help programme and run a Tobii eye-tracker which will record which
video-clip children are looking at when they hear a sentence and how
the looking preferences change during the time-course of the sentence.

To programme E-Prime 2.0 and the interaction with the eye-tracker and
the touch-screen.

To use Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 and / or similar programmes to edit the
above film clips.

To run the test with each child individually, whereby a precise
adherence to the same procedure for each child is required.

Help recruit by approaching parents in the city centre (c. 6 hours
per month) and at NCT nearly new sales.

To conflate the children’s scores in an SPSS spreadsheet, and
(preferably) to help with the statistical analyses.

To assist in thinking up of new „made-up‟ actions and organising
students to help film these.

Such other duties, commensurate with the grading of the post that may
be assigned by the Head of Department or their nominee.

The following qualifications / experience are essential for this
position:
- a University bachelor degree in Computer Science, Psychology,
Linguistics or a related discipline
- experience with computer programming
- an ability to be extremely precise in following experimental
procedures
- an aptitude for learning to run computer programmes
- good organisational skills
- fluent spoken English


The following experience / skills are desirable:
- experience with programming and running E-Prime 2.0
- experience with programming and running a Tobii eye-tracker
- experience of using Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 or similar programmes to
edit video footage
- experience with programming and running reaction-time programmes
- familiarity with data entry in SPSS
- ability to work well with pre-school children
- an interest in child language development

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