Offer: optional seminar "How we perceive and navigate our multisensory digital world"

What: "How we perceive and navigate our multisensory digital world".

When : February 26th-28th, 2025 (from 10am - 4pm) 

Where: BAR S4

Numbers are limited in this instance to 20 so please register your interest by emailing  Pinar Ekin () with the subject line "Block seminar", including your name, discipline and education level. 

Seminar Details:

In this interactive block seminar, to begin with attendees will participate in one of three, short multisensory experiments. These first-person experiences will inform discussions of primary literature detailing how we explore our multisensory digital world. In preparation for the seminar, attendees will be expected to read and present one research article (in English - sent out in advance of the seminar). Research articles will span the breadth of current knowledge of how we use our eyes, ears, nose, tongue and skin to make sense of the world around us and to interact with others. Importantly, we will look into how the senses work together and how this information is processed by the brain, specifically in digital contexts (human robot interaction, haptic technologies, etc.).

In the second half of the seminar, a selection of the presented research studies will be used as practical worked examples. Through these, working in small groups, attendees will learn how to critique experimental designs. From this experience, they will discover the importance and difficulty around coming up with a good research question and glean insight into the benefits of a simple experimental design. This will be bolstered by discussion about how to choose the right measures to assess participant performance and responses. In these hypothetical examples, the strengths and weaknesses of different measures will be assessed and attendees will learn how these need to be tailored to a research question.  

In the final sessions, groups of attendees will be tasked with designing a simple multisensory experiment to tap into how humans learn through their senses. These will then be presented and discussed.