In this talk, I will introduce Virtual Humans (VH) as a powerful tool for studying and characterizing various aspects of human cognition within controlled virtual environments. VH can aid in understanding cognitive processes such as decision-making, problem-solving, and social behavior through behavioral studies. They also serve as standardized testing platforms for assessing cognitive functions like memory, attention, and language processing. Moreover, VH can simulate human behavior and emotions, enabling investigations into social cognition and how individuals perceive and respond to emotions and social cues in virtual interactions. Throughout the talk, I will provide examples of VH applications in human cognition assessment, presenting research projects and their results. Finally, I will discuss potential future implications of VH in this field.
Mariano Alcañiz
Could Embodied Conversational Agents Be the Future for Assessment and Interventions in Clinical Psychology?
About Speaker
Mariano Alcañiz, Ph.D., is founding director of the Immersive Neurotechnologies Lab (LabLENI) at UPV and Professor (tenure position) of Biomedical Engineering at the Polytechnic University of Valencia.
His general research interests hover around a better understanding and enhancement of human cognition combining insights and methods from computer science, psychology, and neuroscience. His work is centered on using empirical, behavioural science methodologies to explore people as they interact in digital worlds, but he also engages in research geared towards developing new ways to produce Extended Reality (XR) simulations. Towards this end, he has been involved in projects related to clinical psychology, neurodevelopmental disorders, consumer neuroscience, organizational neuroscience, education, and training.
He has published more than 350 academic papers, in interdisciplinary journals as well domain-specific journals in the fields of biomedical engineering, computer science, psychology, marketing, management, psychology and education. His work has been continuously funded by the Spanish Research Agency and the European Commission for 30 years. He has been coordinator of several national R&D programs of excellence, program coordinator of the Information Society Technology (IST) of the Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain and he has been the Spanish representative for ICT area at the Horizon 2020 European Research Program Committee. He is also member of the executive committee of EURO-XR association. He has also founded several spin-off companies related with his research field.
This Keynote lecture is supported by the project DigiWell - „Research of Excellence on Digital Technologies and Wellbeing CZ.02.01.01/00/22_008/0004583“ which is co-financed by the European Union.
