CrossWorlds

On September 8, 2015, CrossWorlds member Alexander Skulmowski attended the symposium Embodied Cognition in Multimedia Learning in Rotterdam. The symposium was organized by researchers from Radboud University and Erasmus University Rotterdam. Alexander presented his poster entitled “Embodied Cognitive Load Theory: Introducing a cost-benefit model for embodied interactions.”

The symposium featured a variety of talks related to the role of gestures, animations and other embodiment aspects on learning, among others by Arthur Glenberg. In addition to the talks and posters, demos of gesture-based interactions were presented.

The 9th conference of the Media Psychology Division of the DGPS was held at Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen at the Knowledge Media Research Center. The bi-annual conference is usually attended by mostly German media psychology scholars and researchers, but as in 2013, this year’s conference was an international event with presenters from all over the world.

CrossWorlds members and research students presented their work in Tübingen as well: Alexander Skulmowski presented his paper “Moral decision-making in virtual reality settings – An eye-tracking and pupillometry study”.

The Science Slam featured short and entertaining presentation of media psychology research

Alexander also presented a research poster with master’s student Yannik Augustin titled “A temporal model of aesthetic web site perception”. Research student Dominik Hemeli also presented work with the E-Learning Group with his poster “Mining learning and crafting scientific experiments: The use of Minecraft in education and research and what can be learned from its success for the future of educational videogames”.

Kevin Koban and Benny Liebold also presented their work in a talk titled “Newbies, Start Your Engines. Virtual Motor Skill Training and True Transfer”.

Maria Wirzberger introducing her PhD project within a focus group

CrossWorlds member Maria Wirzberger attended the 2nd Summer School Human Factors in Berlin at July 24th. The one-day event has been organized by the Institute of Psychology and Ergonomics at TU Berlin and offered PhD students, working within various fields of human-machine interaction, the opportunity to gain feedback on their research.

Projects could be introduced either within conventional talks or in an interactive manner within focus groups. The latter gave the chance to discuss the current stage of work more broadly and get valuable input from the attending professors and fellows. Besides of strenghtening existing connections, new contacts were built up during the day and the exciting social event in the evening!

Impressions from the final discussion

CrossWorlds scientists Kevin Koban and Maria Barlag had the pleasure to work with some of the most important people in media research at the summer school “Living With Media” from July 19th to July 24th in Cologne. It has been organized by the Graduate School of the Human Sciences at University of Cologne in collaboration with the College of Communication Arts and Sciences at Michigan State University. Discussed topics ranged from potentials and limitations of serious games, interpersonal knowledge and interpersonal communication, to embodiment, identity and morality.

Leonard Reinecke talking about media use

Besides of listening to exciting talks, each day workshops could be attended to gain deeper knowledge on different topics and additionally enhance experience in working and collaberating with people from all over the world. Within these workshops as well as the accompanying social events, we spent our time with fruitful discussions and in this vein had the chance to extend our research networks!

René, Benedikt and Tobias presenting their posters at Dagstuhl

Once a year, members of DFG research training groups related to computer science meet at beautiful Dagstuhl castle, located in Saarland. For CrossWorlds, our colleagues Benedikt Etzold, René Schmidt and Tobias Höppner participated. Together with PhD students from 16 other research training groups, they looked forward to a rich programme of talks and workshops. The opening consisted of a fast-forward-session, providing each PhD student with a time slot of two minutes to introduce his or her project. Although this doesn’t seem much, for 70 participants even such a short introduction took its time. After this “appetizers” there was the chance to discuss interesting topics to a greater extent within the supportive poster session. Talks on the detection of malware and scientific visualizations completed the programme. Fortunately, enough time remained to get in touch with other PhD students working on similar topics. All in all, our colleagues can look back on three inspiring days!