Opening Keynote:

Tabs, Pads, Boards and Brains: Mental Imagery as a Pervasive Display

Sarah Clinch, University of Manchester, UK

Abstract

For the last few decades, the PerDis community has realised Mark Weiser’s vision for pervasive displays that are seamlessly embedded into our environments. More recently, head-mounted displays (HMD) have become a part of that vision, making displays ever more pervasive. These displays give rise to a plethora of applications, changing the way we interact with space as well as the ways in which we think and communicate. My research has explored how pervasive displays can act as a form of distributed or extended cognition, most notably as an aid to human memory. This allows us to rehearse and enhance our memories, whilst introducing new risks for cognitive manipulation. However, many of us have access to a display that’s more pervasive than any of these devices, our own “mind’s eye”. On this mental display, we recollect and reimagine our pasts, situate ourselves in familiar places for route planning and navigation, take ourselves out of a busy moment into one of stillness and relaxation, and lose ourselves in worlds created in response to music, literature, art and film. However, the ability to create these mental sensory experiences is not universal – estimates suggest that around ~4% of people are unable to create these experiences (a condition referred to as aphantasia). This talk tracks my research journey from pervasive physical displays to visual mental imagery. I’ll outline some key research contributions at the intersection of cognition and digital technologies, and a vision for pervasive digital displays to facilitate visual thought in those with atypical mental imagery. Bio: Sarah Clinch leads the Human-Computer Systems group at the University of Manchester. Her research spans a variety of human-focused applications of mobile and ubiquitous computing, with particular focus on the role of technology in understanding and shaping cognition (with particular interests in aphantasia and human memory). She is passionate about interdisciplinary research that creates robust systems or software that can stand up to long-term, real-world deployment, and follows best practices for open data and open science. Clinch has a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University (2014), was a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University (UK), and has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge (2016); TU Dresden (2015); and Carnegie Mellon University (2009).

Bio

Sarah Clinch leads the Human-Computer Systems group at the University of Manchester. Her research spans a variety of human-focused applications of mobile and ubiquitous computing, with particular focus on the role of technology in understanding and shaping cognition (with particular interests in aphantasia and human memory). She is passionate about interdisciplinary research that creates robust systems or software that can stand up to long-term, real-world deployment, and follows best practices for open data and open science. Clinch has a PhD in Computer Science from Lancaster University (2014), was a post-doctoral researcher in the School of Computing and Communications, Lancaster University (UK), and has held visiting positions at the University of Cambridge (2016); TU Dresden (2015); and Carnegie Mellon University (2009).