Academic Centre
Robert Blumberg Distinguished Lecture in Cognitive Science
by Prof. Sara Irina Fabrikant
University of Zurich, Switzerland
January 16, 2024 (16:00 Riga time)
The lecture will be at Museum of Anatomy (9 Kronvalda boulevard )
Title of the Lecture:
Neuroadaptive navigation assistance to limit spatial de-skilling
Abstract
For thousands of years maps have played a significant role for human mobility and survival. Increasing reliance on digital GNSS-enabled navigation assistance, however, is impacting human’s attentional resources and is limiting their innate cognitive spatial abilities. To mitigate human de-skilling, a neuroadaptive (mobile) cartographic research frontier is proposed and first steps towards creating well-designed mobile geographic information displays (mGIDs) that not only respond to navigators’ cognitive load and visuo-spatial attentional resources during navigation in real-time but are also able to scaffold spatial learning while still maintaining navigation efficiency. This in turn, will help humans to remain as independent from geoinformation technology, as desired.
Sara Irina Fabrikant is a professor of geography, leading the Geographic Information Visualization and Analysis (GIVA) group at the GIScience Center of the Geography Department at the University of Zurich, Switzerland. Her research and teaching interests lie in geographic information visualization and geovisual analytics, GIScience and cognition, graphical user interface design and evaluation, including dynamic cartography. She is a past member of the Swiss Science Council and co-initiator and past co-director of the Digital Society Initiative (DSI) at the University of Zurich. Other service included vice-president of the International Cartographic Association (ICA) 2015-2019, and program and steering committee co-chairing of various international GIScience and spatial information theory related conference series. In 2023 she received the Waldo-Tobler GIScience Prize by the Austrian Academy of Sciences.
Lecture is supported and funded by Robert Blumberg, the honorary consul of the Republic of Latvia in Illinois, USA