Walter Sena

Postdoctoral Fellow

 

VISTA: Visual Inference for Spatio-Temporal Attention

An open-source community initiative for generating naturalistic, annotated video datasets to advance gaze tracking, cognitive assessment, and behavioral neuroscience.

🧠 Overview

VISTA is a framework and dataset initiative aimed at fostering more ecologically valid research in attention and cognition. We provide:

  • AI-generated naturalistic videos simulating everyday scenes
  • Human-curated scripts and interactions ensuring realism and task relevance
  • Rich metadata annotations conforming to HED and FHIR standards
  • Tools for researchers to create, customize, and annotate stimuli for cognitive and gaze-tracking experiments

This project supports explainable AI models and personalized neurocognitive assessment pipelines.

🔍 Key Features

  • Naturalistic Video Stimuli: Real-world inspired visual scenarios designed for ecological validity
  • Spatio-Temporal Attention Labels: AOIs, moving targets, and time-locked cognitive events
  • Scripted & Versioned Content: YAML-based scene scripting
  • HED + FHIR Metadata: Research and clinical interoperability
  • Custom Stimuli Toolkit: (coming soon) Interface and CLI to generate and annotate scenes

🧪 Applications

  • Benchmarking gaze tracking algorithms
  • Modeling attention and cognitive load
  • Remote neuropsychological assessment
  • Autism and neurodevelopmental screening
  • Aging and cognitive resilience tracking
  • Multiple Sclerosis and brain fog

📜 Citation

VISTA: Visual Inference for Spatio-Temporal Attention (2025).
An open-source dataset for naturalistic gaze tracking and cognitive testing.
ubc.neurocognition.ai

 

Research Interests

Cognitive Neuropsychiatry

Research Methodology

Neurocognitive assessment
Gaze tracking

Research Options

I am available and interested in collaborations (e.g. clusters, grants).
I am interested in and conduct interdisciplinary research.
I am interested in working with undergraduate students on research projects.
 
 

If this is your researcher profile you can log in to the Faculty & Staff portal to update your details.