We know little about the impact of augmented reality (AR) on human cognition, particularly regarding involuntary autobiographical memory (IAM).IAMs are spontaneous recollections of personal events, ubiquitous in daily life but under-researched in both psychology and human-computer interaction.We first discuss the potential opportunities and risks of replacing conventional displays with AR to increase the likelihood of IAMs.We then report on a study investigating whether stimuli displayed on the same mobile device using video-see-through AR are more likely to resurface than those shown with a simple 3D viewer.We found that AR elicits approximately twice as many IAMs in controlled settings with immediate re-exposure to contextual cues, but no measurable effect was found in everyday settings with delayed re-exposure.Therefore, AR can enhance IAMs, but its effects may be modest and short-lived in most cases.Nevertheless, future studies could reveal stronger effects of AR in other settings.Supplementary material is available at osf.io/gscpv/.

Curiosity-driven learning has shown significant positive effects on students’ learning experiences and outcomes. But despite this importance, reports show that children lack this skill, especially in formal educational settings.

International audience

Despite the promotion of equal access to education, the proportion of persons with disabilities decreases drastically from primary school to higher education, resulting in a lower level of education. This lack of qualification represents an additional obstacle to employment opportunities, reinforcing their exclusion from the social sphere. In recent years, computer-based approaches to education have undergone a real revolution, as reflected by the massive growth of MOOCs platforms. As they are flexible enough, they could provide a real opportunity to create learning environments that are beneficial to persons with disabilities. Unfortunately, most MOOCs are not ‘sufficiently’ accessible, especially for persons with cognitive impairments and limited learning capacities. In this article, we describe the results of a participatory design process that involved students with cognitive impairments and specialists from various fields of expertise and led to the co-design of new functionalities to enhance the accessibility of a MOOC player. We also present the results of a multiple-cases study evaluation of a first prototype, whose results support the positive impact of our design decisions. Finally, we propose an integrative framework for the design of accessible e-learning systems derived from the different needs and guidelines that emerged during the process.

Question asking is an important tool for constructing academic knowledge, and a self-reinforcing driver of curiosity. However, research has found that question asking is infrequent in the classroom and children's questions are often superficial, lacking deep reasoning. In this work, we developed a pedagogical agent that encourages children to ask divergent-thinking questions, a more complex form of questions that is associated with curiosity. We conducted a study with 95 fifth grade students, who interacted with an agent that encourages either convergent-thinking or divergent-thinking questions. Results showed that both interventions increased the number of divergent-thinking questions and the fluency of question asking, while they did not significantly alter children's perception of curiosity despite their high intrinsic motivation scores. In addition, children's curiosity trait has a mediating effect on question asking under the divergent-thinking agent, suggesting that question-asking interventions must be personalized to each student based on their tendency to be curious.

Aging creates needs for assistive technology to support all activities of daily living (meal preparation, dressing, social participation, stove monitoring, etc.). These needs are mostly addressed by a silo-based approach that requires a new assistive service (e.g., a reminder system, a pill prompter) to be acquired for every activity to be supported. In practice, these services manifest their silo-based nature in their user interactions, and more specifically, in the heterogeneity of their notification system. This heterogeneity incurs a cognitive cost that prevents scaling up assistive services and compromises adoption by older adults. This paper presents an approach to scaling up the combination of technology-based, assistive services by proposing a unifying notification system. To do so, (1) we propose a decomposition of assistive services to expose their needs in notification; (2) we introduce a notification framework, allowing heterogeneous assistive services to homogeneously notify users; (3) we present how this notification framework is carried out in practice for an assisted living platform.

This paper presents an approach to verifying the activities of daily living of older adults at their home. We verify activities, instead of inferring them, because our monitoring approach is driven by routines, initially sketched by users in their environment. Monitoring is supported by a lightweight sensor infrastructure, comprising non-intrusive, low-cost, wireless devices. Verification is performed by applying a simple formula to sensor log data, for each activity of interest. The result value determines whether an activity has been performed.

Including children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) in mainstreamed environments creates a need for new interventions whose efficacy must be assessed in situ.

Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) plays a critical role in software systems, especially when targeting vulnerable individuals (e.g., assistive technologies). However, there exists a gap between well-tooled software development methodologies and HCI techniques, which are generally isolated from the development toolchain and require specific expertise. In this paper, we propose a human-driven software development methodology making User Interface (UI) a full-fledged dimension of software design. To make this methodology useful in practice, a UI design language and a user modeling language are integrated into a tool suite that guides the stakeholders during the development process, while ensuring the conformance between the UI design and its implementation.

The goal of this study is to explore new navigation methods in Virtual Reality (VR) and to understand the impact of motor activity on spatial cognition, and more precisely the question of the spatial learning transfer. We present a user study comparing two interfaces with different motor activities: the first one, a walking interface (a treadmill with rotation) gives the user a high level of sensorimotor activity (especially body-based and vestibular information). The second one, a brain computer interface (BCI), enables the user to navigate in a virtual environment (VE) without any motor activity, by using brain activity only. The task consisted in learning a path in a virtual city built from a 3D model of a real city with either one of these two interfaces (named treadmill condition and BCI condition), or in the real city directly (the real condition). Then, participants had to recall spatial knowledge, according to six different tasks assessing spatial memory and transfer. We also evaluated the ergonomics of these two interfaces and the presence felt by participants. Surprisingly, contrary to expectations, our results showed similar performances whatever the spatial restitution tasks or the interfaces used, very close to that of the real condition, which tends to indicate that motor activity is not essential to learn and transfer spatial knowledge. Even if BCI seems to be less natural to use than the treadmill, our study suggests that BCI is a promising interface for studying spatial cognition.

The use of virtual reality in the area of spatial cognition raises the question of the quality of learning transfer from a virtual to a real environment. Among the challenges, one is to determine the best cognitive aids to improve the quality of transfer and the conditions in which this is best achieved. The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of passive and active exploration mode on quality of transfer in three different spatial recall tasks when the route was simple or complex.