Psychologists on the RECALL team, Prof Geoff Ward and Dr Caterina Cinel (University of Essex) are currently writing up the campus RECALL trials that were recently presented at the 6th International Conference on Memory (ICOM) in Budapest, Hungary on the 17-22 July 2016 – see www.icom2016.com
Category Archives: Research Update
WAHM 2016: 3rd Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting Human Mind
RECALL researchers Tilman Dingler and Evangelos Niforatos recently collaborated with Kai Kunze (Osaka Prefecture University), Cathal Gurin (Dublin City University), Ioannis Giannopoulos (ETH Zurich), Andreas Dengel (German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence) and Koichi Kise (Osaka Prefecture University) to organize the 3rd Workshop on Ubiquitous Technologies for Augmenting the Human Mind – WAHM 2016. The workshop took place on September 12th in Heidelberg, Germany as part of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp ‘16).
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Effects of Camera Position and Media Type on Lifelogging Images (MUM Best Paper Award)
At this year’s International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM) we presented results from a RECALL study on lifelog camera positioning. MUM is a leading annual international conference, which provides a forum for presenting the latest research results on mobile and ubiquitous multimedia. The paper – spearheaded by Katrin Wolf – has been awarded with the best paper award.
Continue reading Effects of Camera Position and Media Type on Lifelogging Images (MUM Best Paper Award)
Recall at SARMAC 2015
On June 24-28 Recall researcher Dr Caterina Cinel attended SARMAC 2015, a biennial conference on applied memory and cognition. Researchers at the conference present work where psychological theories of memory and cognition are applied to real-word domains, such as law, education, advertising, politics, etc. At the conference, Caterina presented a poster showing the research carried out at Essex University in the last year on retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF). RIF is a well-studied phenomenon where retrieval practice of a subset of events can enhance their later recall, but can impair accessibility to related but unreviewed events. In seven experiments, Essex researchers C. Cinel and G. Ward show that we can manipulate factors that selectively amplify and/or attenuate the forgetting and enhancement of selected memories. However, whereas retrieval practice effects can be found with all stimuli, to date, evidence for RIF has been limited to semantic lab-based stimuli, while we found limited evidence of RIF with real-word, episodic stimuli.
The poster was very well received and during the presentation session many researchers have shown interest in our research and given valuable insight and comments.
Reading Studies: Increasing Reading Speed and Comprehension
In RECALL we aim to augment human memory in several ways; one of which being the strand of semantic memory. Therefore, we started looking into the design of knowledge acquisition points and – due to its prominence in learning and information consumption – reading.
With the advent of the information age and the creation of electronic reading devices – such as mobile phones, e-readers or tablets – our reading behavior has been changing and we are facing new challenges, one of which being information overload. We are bombarded with an abundance of text on a daily basis: news, emails, tweets, feeds, books, papers, articles, technical literature and pleasure readings. But our reading strategy has mainly remained the same. Continue reading Reading Studies: Increasing Reading Speed and Comprehension
Déjà vu – Technologies that make new Situations look Familiar
In this post we want to discuss the application of a concept known as Déjà vu; making use of its effects we envision technologies that make new situations and encounters more familiar and less threatening.
Going to new places, interacting with new people and carrying out new tasks is part of everyday life. New situations create a sense of excitement but in many cases also anxiety based on a fear of the unknown.
In RECALL we started exploring the use of peripheral displays to automatically provide information about potential future experiences in order to allow people to learn incidentally and without conscious effort about new environments and people. The expectation is that having visual information provided, we can create a sense of déjà vu when people are in a new situation. We use the term déjà vu it a positive sense, following the definition of the Oxford dictionary: “feeling of having already experienced the present situation”. Continue reading Déjà vu – Technologies that make new Situations look Familiar
Recall-induced Forgetting and Intelligent Review
Suppose you could capture and process a synopsis of your day into an edited summary that you reviewed each night?
In Recall, we envisage an future in which technology can be used to help individuals actively maintain their memories through the review of recent experiences. For example, mobile devices, TV screens, heads-up displays and projectors could all be used as mechanisms for showing an “intelligent review” that summarised key events through video, email snippets, calendar events etc.
Recall researchers Geoff Ward and Caterina Cinel are beginning work on the intelligent review function of RECALL. What might we expect the mnemonic consequences to be of watching your daily synopsis on your later spontaneous ability to recall events from that day? Based on the laboratory phenomenon of retrieval–induced forgetting (RIF, see April 2014 post), one might expect increased access to the revised material but decreased access to related but not practiced events.
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Recall-Induced Forgetting for Real-World Experiences
Recall researchers Geoff Ward and Caterina Cinel from the University of Essex are finishing a preliminary series of three psychology experiments for Recall examining whether a phenomenon known as retrieval-induced forgetting (or RIF, see Anderson, Bjork & Bjork, 1994) which can be observed with words in the psychology laboratory will be likely to be found with images of autobiographical memories in the real world. Continue reading Recall-Induced Forgetting for Real-World Experiences