Meeting with Paul Verschure

Today, I had a meeting with Paul Verschure. Paul is an ICREA Professor at the UPF with a background in cognitive neuroscience and neuroinformatics.

For my interest on the impact of special uncertainty, he advised me to have a closer look at the literature in spatial cognition and more precisely in spatial navigation. Somehow, his suggested to step backward to the first results and literature review I did so far. First I should gain basic understanding of spatial cognition under uncertainty and then suggest implications for design. We talked about the ways the studies are ran in experimental psychology and specifically how to carefully control conditions (manipulating uncertainty) in uncontrolled environments. it is very much possible when the control group and the experimental group are very carefully selected and managed. One challenge is not to fall into the problem of confirmation bias (interpret information according to preconceptions). In my context, I could work on three parameters (e.g. map resolution, abstraction of the data on the map, …) and then measure the performance and/or the learning.

I plan to setup a second experiment in a larger scale uncontrolled environment (because “scale” is one of the 2 most important challenge of ubicomp, next to “context”). Paul was pretty enthusiast about it and saw a lot of potential. It could actually become a real-world framework for multiple experiments (potential at the 22@ area). A scholarship is potentially available for a psychologist to work with me. Moreover, structures such as the Urban Ecology Agency of Barcelona are in deep need of data about people’s mobility and might be interested in getting involved. Such connection would match with my early digging into ABM and transportation research. I also came up some fun basic study that could involve Barcelona taxi drivers using GPS systems . To that, Paul mentioned a study in London that showed that Taxi drivers’ brains ‘grow’ on the job due to the navigating they do (“The posterior hippocampus was also more developed in taxi drivers who had been in the career for 40 years than in those who had been driving for a shorter period.”).

On the side, Paul introduced me to Bayesian Inference and how users have multiple sources of information (in the context of spatial uncertainty).

Relation to my thesis: facing experimental psychology and first thoughts on the resources available for a second experiment. I will dig in the spatial cognition literature.