- Project «Tracking visual images in healthy aging»
Visual mental imagery characterizes our inner worlds. We mostly experience our world via visual perception and when recalling past events, we rely on mental imagery. In this project we aim to investigate the generation and inspection of detailed mental images in the elderly with an eye-tracking approach. Eye data provide a unique window to understand mental imagery and visual memory in the elderly.
- Project "The impact of mind-wandering on the precision of episodic memory"
Disengaging from the external world – a phenomenon referred to as mind-wandering – is a ubiquitous experience that has been shown to be associated with detriments in cognitive performance across a large range of tasks. In the current project, we investigate the impact of task disengagement on spatial episodic memory.
- Project "Using virtual reality to learn about inaccessible micro- and macrocosmic structures in primary school"
This project aims to identify the opportunities and challenges when it comes to developing, implementing and evaluating an immersive virtual reality (VR) tool for science teaching in primary schools.
- Project "Drawing as an encoding tool to enhance episodic memory of elderly people"
In the current project we investigate whether drawing can be used as encoding tool to enhance episodic memory performance of elderly people.
- Project "Preschool children’s learning from 3D virtual reality: Investigating the educational impact of the 21st century fairy tales"
Young children show a keen interest in fictional stories, and, simultaneously a tendency to quarantine information from fictional stories. Digitalization of educational materials cannot be avoided, but there is a lack of empirical evidence on how it affects learning and memory in children. We are interested in the use of new media and in their potential impact in promoting learning.
- Project "Using virtual reality to investigate access, fidelity, and vividness of visual mental representations"
When recalling an object that you have previously seen how do the different features location, orientation, and color integrate in memory? To understand the relations between individual features of visual mental representations it is essential to extend the existing research to a 3D virtual reality approach, which allows to represent space in a more natural way than 2D computer-based experiments.
Completed projects
- Project "Distance learning: Individual differences & distributed vs. massed learning"
It is well known that humans learn more effectively when the material is spread out over a period of time in different learning sessions (i.e. distributed learning) than when they learn the material in one long session (i.e. massed learning). Here we want to replicate and extend this finding to a mixed mode approach in a distance learning setting based on new technologies.
- Project "Learning through teaching: Educational applications of virtual reality"
Explaining information to someone else in learning situations can help with learning new material (learning through teaching method). Here, we want to link the use of virtual reality (VR) with the learning through teaching method.
