Studying the Social Brain using Wearables and Theatre
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Welcome to our ABC Seminars! This seminar series is open for everyone. The talk will take place in . After the talks, coffee and pulla will be served.
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Studying the Social Brain using Wearables and Theatre
Abstract: Measuring detailed information on how people move, see, and think during realistic social situations can be a powerful method in studying social behaviour and cognition. However, measurement-driven research can be limited by the available technology, with bulky equipment and rigid constraints often confining such work to the laboratory, thus limiting the ecological validity of any findings. In this talk, I will discuss some of the studies on live performance I’ve been involved with, using techniques like wearable EEG hyperscanning, eye-tracking, and motion capture. The work aims to explore the use of live performance and theatre as a laboratory for real-world neuroscience, while developing new measurement techniques using wearable sensors.
Bio: Dr Jamie A Ward is a Professor of Computer Science at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research lies at the intersection of wearable computing, theatre, and psychology, where he uses body-worn sensors to study human behaviour across a diverse range of social situations. He received his Ph.D. in electronics from ETH Zurich, where he developed some of the first uses of multi-modal, wearable sensing for human activity recognition. He continued this work as a Marie Curie Research Fellow in Computing at Lancaster University, and later as a postdoc at DFKI Germany, and the UCL Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience. In between these posts he retrained and worked as an actor. His work centres around the convergence of technology, neuroscience, theatre, and autism, and has been funded by grants from the Royal Society and the European Research Council (ERC). He recently served as a visiting professor at Keio University, Japan and is currently Head of the School of Computing at Goldsmiths. For more details, see .