Fade to Play

Image: MARK RICHARDS (Gordon Bell portrait); PHOTOCOMPOSITION BY JANA BRENNING

In next month’s Scientific American there is an article by Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell about Gordon’s MyLifeBits project at Microsoft in which he creates a permanent record of all aspects of his daily life.

Our research project, called MyLifeBits, has provided some of the tools needed to compile a lifelong digital archive. We have found that digital memories allow one to vividly relive an event with sounds and images, enhancing personal reflection in much the same way that the Internet has aided scientific investigations. Every word one has ever read, whether in an e-mail, an electronic document or on a Web site, can be found again with just a few keystrokes. Computers can analyze digital memories to help with time management, pointing out when you are not spending enough time on your highest priorities. Your locations can be logged at regular intervals, producing animated maps that trace your peregrinations. Perhaps most important, digital memories can enable all people to tell their life stories to their descendants in a compelling, detailed fashion that until now has been reserved solely for the rich and famous.

Relevance: What aspects of your life would you want to keep a record of and then relive? Maybe the last time you saw your best friend from grade 8 before they moved away? Or to hear the sounds of your last night at summer camp? In some sense, I am keeping a record of my life which is permanent through the online locations where I store information of relevance to me. I use my blog to store thoughts and content of relevance to my research, my flickr account to store photos, my del.icio.us site to keep my URLs found, and save alot of emails via gmail. I like how I am able to look back at aspects of my life and I know I would feel very lost if somehow all my digital photos disappeared.

According to this Toronto Star article, a McMaster University study states that the elderly can keep sharp and maintain sufficient levels of cognitive capacity by playing video games.

Psychology research at Hamilton’s McMaster University shows gamers who spend more than four hours a week playing action video games such as Medal of Honour and Half Life 2 have a surprising array of skills ranging from quick reaction times and good spatial reasoning to a strong awareness of their surroundings and better short-term memory.

With as little as 10 hours of training, non-gamers start to show the same mental strengths, says psychology researcher Jim Karle, a graduate student in the department of psychology, neuroscience and behaviour.

Calling video games “beneficial for the brain,” Karle suggested they could be used to help reduce cognitive decline in the elderly.

“Individuals who play action video games on a regular basis – more then four hours a week -appear to be very good at an astonishing variety of skills,” said Karle.

“Just as an elderly adult may do 15 minutes of weight training to fight osteoporosis,” he said, “so could he or she play video games to keep the mind sharp.”

Image via Half Life 2

Relevance: I wonder we would get similar finding in a study of the elderly and games that involves physical movement with mobile technologies (mobile phones, tabletPCs) rather than the stationary behaviour of digital games. I don’t believe there has been any studies done regarding the elderly and cognition involving ubicomp and pervasive games.

Call For Papers – Cognitio 2006 @ UQAM

Cognitio 2006 — Young researchers conference in cognitive science, Beyond the brain: embodied, situated & distributed cognition

Montreal, August 19th, 20th & 21st 2006.

- Graduate [AND UNDERGRADUATE] students are invited to present their researches in an interdisciplinary conference on cognitive science, Cognitio, that will be held at the University of Quebec in Montreal (UQAM), on August 19th, 20th & 21st, 2006.

- Participants should be graduate students from any discipline or postdoc researchers affiliated with a university or research centre.

- To submit a conference, send an abstract (300 words) before april 15th, to: cognitio2006@gmail.com.

- Please specify your institutional affiliation.

- This years’ theme is: Beyond the brain: embodied, situated & distributed cognition. Conferences on other topics are welcome,

- either in French or English. All talks will be 30 minutes long (including discussion) and should be addressed to an interdisciplinary audience.

- A financial assistance could be granted to participants from outside Quebec.

- Selected participants will be contacted by April 30th.

Informations : http://cognitio.uqam.ca – cognitio2006@gmail.com

Organization: Benoit Hardy-Vallée, Nicolas Payette, Pierre Poirier (UQAM)

Poster: http://cognitio.uqam.ca/cfp/callforpapers.pdf

Technorati Tags: cognition, brain, conference, cfp

Bush, V. (1945). As We May Think. The Atlantic Monthly. 176(1), 101-108.

This is a classic paper that foresaw technologies such as the Web and hyperlinks and he discusses ideas on how scientists should move away from physical activities such as war to more of a focus on the organisation (access and retrieval) of knowledge. As I read this paper, I found relevance for some of the web2.0 technologies that are prevalent today (e.g. blogs) and how they are being used as personal information spaces.

I would like to further outline his ideas for information storage and information retrieval. He thought of the development of a camera that would be used to record aspects of a person’s life and would be stored on a microfilm system, which would enable mass storage inexpensively. Documents could be retrieved by associating each document with a machine-readable code (think unique tag) that would enable it to be retrieved from the mass storage space automatically. This idea cumulated in the development of the memex, a device that is desk-sized which can be used to store all the information (such as documents and communication) that someone would find of relevance. It would then become an extended storage place for one’s memory. This idea of calling up documents and annotation them brings to mind some of the features I use in citeulike in which I can leave notes about the document, I have stored.

Consider a future device for individual use, which is a sort of mechanized private file and library. It needs a name, and, to coin one at random, “memex” will do. A memex is a device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility. It is an enlarged intimate supplement to his memory.

In a CSCW class, I sat in on Thursday, the professor discussed this paper as part of the reading material for the course. He talked about his system being an automated filtering system in which a personal library is conneted to a larger information space (see the del.icio.us connection here). What is missing from his paper is the abilities for these tools to provide a social infrastructure within a collective knowledge space.

Relevance: As my thesis looks at tagged information spaces from a foundation of personal information management and personal information spaces, I find his vision of importance. How do I use tags and blogs as memory devices and what is the added collective value of sharing through the internet my “remembering” space.

Technorati tags: memory, cscw, history, knowledge

Below are some of the comments provided to me after I gave my presentation at the CHI 2005 Cognition and Collaboration Workshop. This is why workshop have been the most beneficial aspect of my research career. They are incredibly useful in getting relevant information from intelligent people in a short space of time.

Summary of Comments from Distributed Cognition Workshop

• Christine offered a couple of papers that I should read:

• Barbara Kelly’s paper on discourse linguistics about gestures provides an in-depth analysis of kids and language – how gestures can contribute to it

• Naomi Miyake wrote a paper where she put experts and novices together to understand what experts know, there is a clear methodology of interest to me.

• I should also look at Vygotsky and his peer learning research rather than discount the work on zone of proximity.
• I should look at Data Frame Theory for sense-making http://www.decisionmaking.com/
o Theory for how people process information and build mental models
o Fits with preconception & bias
• I can also look from a CSCW perspective at dyads on analysis of how people work together to overcome bias
• Look at Kevin Dunbar
o Discovery is a distributed process
• CHI 94
o Karat & Bennet
o 1 to correct the mistakes of each other

• Herb Simon
o Paired collaborative learning for science discovery for discovery process
o Sharing and correcting mental models
o Found that pairs are faster at a discovery for discovery process
o Sharing and correcting of mental models
• Kevin Dunbar
o Discovery is a distributed process

CogSci 2006 July 26-30, 2006. This year, we highlight Learning: Tackling Both Implicit and Explicit Processes .

Plenary speakers will include

* Robert Siegler (CMU)
* Daniel Schacter (Harvard)

Plenary symposia will include

* The Synergy between Implicit and Explicit Learning Processes (Organizers: Ron Sun and Robert Mathews. Speakers: Axel Cleeremans, Zoltan Dienes, Lynne Reder, Robert Mathews)
* The Emerging Learning Sciences

Deadlines

All submissions (except Member Posters and Publication-Based Talks) due: 2/1/2006

Acceptance notifications: 4/15/2006

Final camera-ready copies due: 5/15/2006

Submissions for Member Posters and Publication-Based Talks due (in the final form; no further revisions possible): 5/1/2006

Acceptance notifications for submissions for Member Posters and Publication-Based Talks: 5/15/2006

There is a strong learning focus to the conference probably due to the learning and CSCL emphasis of Naomi Miyake, one of the conference co-chairs.

I just came across this lab at UBC. As my thesis needs an experiment component I want to do an experiment that involves embodied cognition. It would be useful to contact the director of the lab for ideas.