Immersive Metaphoric Experiences for Well-Being

Descripción del proyecto

IMSquared: Experiencias metafóricas interactivas para el bienestar

Nuestros pensamientos a menudo son metafóricos y pueden influir en nuestro comportamiento y nuestras emociones. Esto concuerda con la investigación en ciencias cognitivas y la teoría de la metáfora conceptual que muestran que el pensamiento abstracto se basa en la experiencia física. Hay diversas metáforas espaciales relacionadas con nuestra concepción de la salud y el bienestar. Sin embargo, carecemos de investigaciones sistemáticas sobre la modelización metafórica y su reflejo en el cuerpo. El proyecto financiado con fondos europeos IMSquared abordará esta carencia creando un repositorio de experiencias metafóricas inmersivas (IMME, por sus siglas en inglés) para restaurar el bienestar físico y mental en conjunto. Además, desarrollará una interfaz informática cerebro-cuerpo-medios y un conjunto de herramientas para obtener funciones con potencial terapéutico. Juntos, estos avances conducirán a una comprensión más profunda del papel de las metáforas interactivas en la recuperación, concretamente en el tratamiento de la depresión durante la neurorehabilitación y la terapia física.

Objetivo

The goal of IMSquared (IM2) is to develop and validate a repository of immersive metaphoric experiences (IMMEs) aimed at restoring physical and emotional wellness in tandem and to provide a brain-body-media computer interface (BBMCI) and toolkit that facilitates visual-gestural interaction, neural-behavioral analysis, generation and optimization of IMMEs with implications for physical therapy (neurorehabilitation) and commercial therapeutic applications. The development and validation of IMMEs will draw on state-of-the-art research across cognitive science/AI, cognitive neuroscience, and computational linguistics looking at the embodiment, neural coding, and the psychological reality of various conceptual metaphors relating to wellness and health. According to conceptual metaphor theory, abstract concepts are structured through cross-domain mappings with more concrete domains due to co-occurrences between these concepts during development. For example, our experience with upward motion becomes associated with well-being (e.g. getting up in the morning), while downward motion becomes associated with ill-being (e.g. lying down when sick), leading us to conceptualize good and bad things in terms of verticality (e.g. “lifting her spirits”, “feeling down”). Growing behavioral evidence suggests that much of thought may be metaphorical in nature and that the relevant physical experience can have consequences for emotion and behavior, yet the systematic investigation of conceptual mappings and their embodiment within HCI, particularly involving media-gestural interfaces, in wellness research is lacking. In summary, IM2 paves the way for more neurocognitively-inspired HCI-wellness research influenced by our understanding of minds, brains, machines, and our new abilities to interact with virtual semantic content, transforming our approach to addressing wellness and health during recovery.