Naila Ayala

PhD Candidate, Developmental Visuomotor Neuroscience Lab

Naila received her Master’s of Neuroscience degree at the University of Western Ontario in 2019. She then joined Dr. Niechwiej-Szwedo’s lab at the University of Waterloo in 2020 and is currently a PhD candidate of Neuroscience with a focus on eye-tracking and visuomotor control. Her research explores how gaze behaviour can provide an objective measure of information processing, decision-making and complex skill performance.

In collaboration with WISA, she is working to apply these questions to aviation education with the broader goal of enhancing our understanding of the complex human factors involved in piloting an aircraft and guiding the development of novel training paradigms and industry practices.  

Selected Publications:

• Ayala, N., Zafar, A. ., Kearns, S. ., Irving, E. ., Cao, S. ., & Niechwiej-Szwedo, E. (2023). The effects of task difficulty on gaze behaviour during landing with visual flight rules in low-time pilots. Journal of Eye Movement Research, 16(1). https://doi.org/10.16910/jemr.16.1.3

• Ayala, N., Zafar, A., Niewchwiej-Szwedo, E. (2022). Characterizing individual differences in task performance and task difficulty with gaze entropy. Journal of Vision, Vol.22, 3662. doi:https://doi.org/10.1167/jov.22.14.3662

• Naila Ayala, Diako Mardanbegi, Andrew T. Duchowski, Ewa Niechwiej-Szwedo, Shi Cao, Suzanne Kearns, and Elizabeth Irving. 2023. On The Visibility Of Fiducial Markers For Mobile Eye Tracking. In 2023 Symposium on Eye Tracking Research and Applications (ETRA ’23), May 30–June