{"id":2675,"date":"2026-02-06T15:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-02-06T20:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/makerspace\/?p=2675"},"modified":"2026-03-02T12:38:02","modified_gmt":"2026-03-02T17:38:02","slug":"building-a-mirrorhaploscope-when-psychology-meets-the-makerspace","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sites.williams.edu\/makerspace\/projects\/building-a-mirrorhaploscope-when-psychology-meets-the-makerspace\/","title":{"rendered":"Building a Mirrorhaploscope: When Psychology Meets the Makerspace"},"content":{"rendered":"

Introduction<\/strong><\/h2>\n
\"An<\/a>

An early iteration of the Mirrorhaploscope. before additional horizontal tracks were added for increased maneuverability.<\/p><\/div>\n

Most people think vision is simple. You open your eyes and see. The new mirrorhaploscope in Assistant Professor Kim Wong\u2019s lab proves it is much more complicated.<\/span> This past fall, Professor Wong reached out to the Williams Makerspace with a request that would merge research, design, and hands-on building: a mirrorhaploscope for studying how the brain chooses what we see. The device will be used in both PSYC 300 (Perception) and the WAVE Lab (Wong Attention, Vision, and Encoding Lab)<\/a>, supporting studies of visual awareness, attention, and binocular rivalry. The collaboration made it possible for students to help construct a fully functional research instrument that they will later use in their own experiments.<\/span><\/p>\n

The Problem or Research Purpose<\/h2>\n

A mirrorhaploscope is a deceptively simple optical instrument with powerful implications. It allows researchers to present different images to each eye at the same time\u2014allowing us to push our visual system to its limits, and test <\/span>unconscious, automatic processing<\/span><\/i>. With this setup, Professor Wong can run Continuous Flash Suppression (CFS) experiments, a method that consists of overwhelming one eye with a chaotic, rapidly flashing pattern (aka a \u201cdynamic Mondrian mask\u201d),  while the other sees a stable image. This flashing is so overwhelming to the visual system that it completely dominates awareness, and the brain temporarily \u201csuppresses\u201d the stable image. Experimenters then measure the amount of time it takes for the stable image to finally \u201cbreak through\u201d the suppression from the flashing pattern.<\/span><\/p>\n

In plain terms? The device lets researchers peek into how attention and perception works while the participant themselves <\/span>has no idea that there is even another image present at all<\/span><\/i>.  This allows them to ask the critical question: \u201cWhat does your visual system do automatically, before you\u2019re even conscious of it?\u201d They can thus experimentally manipulate: <\/span><\/p>\n