Hanne Wagner and Horia Maior will both give short talks to the lab.
The last couple of decades have seen an ongoing decrease in overall voting turnout and political engagement in general. This trend is particularly strong among the group of young voters under the age of 30. Through my PhD research I am looking into ways of how young adults could be re-introduced to and engaged with the field of politics with through the means of technology, especially through the means of (mostly mainstream) video games. The influence of more traditional media on political attitude and interest has been well documented in the literature, whereas the potential effect of video games is still largely unknown. Through my work I try thus to understand players’ awareness of politics in-game, how ‘politics’ are used in designing games as well as what aspects of video games are particularly useful in promoting political engagement.
Feedback is valuable in goal pursuit as it provides the individual with a real time overview of what is going on. Feedback can potentially support adjustment of effort and prioritisation of tasks so immediate goals are achieved. I am going to present to you a novel approach to providing users with concurrent feedback of their Mental Workload, based on objective measures of brain activity as well as the results of our latest BCI experiment. We compared this feedback to traditional methods of asking users to self-assess and report their own mental workload during tasks. In line with previous work, we confirmed that self-reporting methods affect both perceived and actual performance. Furthermore, we found that our objective concurrent feedback technique allowed participants to reflect metacognitively about their Mental Workload during tasks, without reducing either actual or perceived performance during an Air Traffic Controller Task.
University of Nottingham School of Computer Science Nottingham, NG8 1BB
email: mrl@cs.nott.ac.uk