If you can’t join the colloquium in person, you are welcomed to join the colloquium via Zoom.

https://cityu.zoom.us/j/99815232152
Meeting ID: 998 1523 2152
Passcode: 005441

The SCM Research Colloquium takes place approximately once a month for graduate students, faculty and professionals from creative media and other related disciplines to present their recent research topic/project. The colloquium offers a great opportunity for ideas exchange and intellectual conversations about one’s work. Each session will feature two speakers, a graduate student/guest speaker and a faculty member.

Each presentation is about 30 minutes, followed by 15 minutes open discussion. Seminar introduction and Q&A will be hosted by Prof. Richard Allen and/or Prof. PerMagnus Lindborg. No registration is needed and light refreshments are provided.

Seminar 5
6 February 2024, 12:30 p.m – 2:30 p.m
Emotion and Perception in Virtual, Multi-User Communication

Alston Lantian Xu: Unraveling the Cognitive Dynamics: Predictive Processing and Rotated Object Recognition

In today's presentation, I will delve into the fascinating area of human cognition, focusing on how we recognize objects that have been rotated. We frame our discussion within the predictive processing theory, a concept suggesting that our brain uses past experiences and our interactions with the environment to anticipate future events. A crucial part of this process is what's known as sensory-motor contingency, the idea that the way we move affects how we perceive things. For example, we expect to see an object from a certain angle based on our position relative to it.

Building on this concept, our research investigates how we understand and interact with the space around us — what we term as world space, human space, and object space. While previous studies, like the well-known mental rotation experiment, showed that it takes longer to recognize an object the more it is rotated, our experiments introduce a new variable, positions of the objects. We used Shepard Figures, a type of visual illusion, in various positions across a large display to examine how quickly and accurately subjects could recognize these figures.

Our results highlight the significant role of predictive processing, particularly how our expectations influence recognition times — in some cases, adding up to 1.2 seconds. Interestingly, our data also suggest that the processes of sensory-motor contingency and mental rotation are distinct from each other. From these insights, we propose a new framework for understanding how we recognize objects, particularly in explaining why recognition might take longer under certain conditions.

Royce Ng: Virtual Reality Prototypes for the Psychological Well-Being of Palliative Care Patients in Hong Kong

In this presentation, we present our research in the field of ‘digital thanatology’ or technology developed for the dying. What was once the realm of cinema and science fiction has now become realizable with new virtual reality technologies. In this paper we introduce a novel Virtual Reality (VR) treatment to improve the psychological well being of patients in palliative care, which we have developed with the clinical psychologist Olive Woo who has successfully implemented VR assisted interventions on palliative care patients in the Hong Kong hospital system. Our VR and AR assisted interventions are adaptations of traditional palliative care therapies which simultaneously facilitate patients communication with family and friends while isolated in hospital due to physical weakness and COVID-19 related restrictions. Our system is a networked platform for palliative care patients to create customized virtual environments with therapists, family and friends which function as immersive and collaborative versions of ‘life review’ and ‘reminiscence therapy’, that helps patients narrativize their life and come to terms with death.

Links: https://www.royce-ng.com/