Plugging In: Studying the Mind with Technology

There is an ongoing debate about children's relationship with technology and the starting age for using technological devices. While some parents are proud of their children’s competence in swiping away, some are concerned about screen time and their children's social abilities. My research is looking at different factors affecting children's creativity and among these I will be talking about technology and peer collaboration. Does having a friend by their side make children better storytellers? Can a non-technological game help children as much as a tablet?

We see endless news on children spending too much time on smartphones or computers and not being social. In a few years, we may see worries that children are spending too much time with robots. Robotics and entertainment companies are developing advanced robots to be social companions and perform jobs with a social nature. At Sheffield Robotics we study the ethics in creating such robots and human-robot interaction. I look at what we can learn about our own social behaviours by designing robot ‘personalities’, and studying people’s interactions with these, asking, what can robots teach us?

How does Sheffield feel? The #happysheffield project found out! The project measures happiness by carrying out real-time analysis of words used by Sheffield-based twitter users. The results of this analysis are displayed on a website. The project took place in 2016 as part of the University of Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind and was a collaboration between University of Sheffield academics, Human Studio and Ignite Imaginations. My talk will describe the project, lessons learned from it and implications about our relationship with social media.

Studying how people learn to play computer games gives us clues to how we learn skills in general. Not only do some people spend thousands of hours practicing their skills within computer games, but because they use a computer it is easy to track the actions they take during that practice. My research tries to join up the history of how people practice with the consequences it has for their skills. The results tell us about the best way to practice any skill - not just games.