Julien Mercier
Biography
Julien Mercier is a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the Université du Québec à Montréal and Director of NeuroLab, a major research infrastructure funded by the Canada Foundation for Innovation. His research integrates affective and cognitive neuroscience with psychology to study how people learn, play and work, individually and collaboratively, with technological tools.
Subjects of interests
- Cognition
- Interaction design
- Emotions and learning
- Human-machine interaction
- Applied cognitive science
- Smart tutorial systems
- Collaborative technology practices
Why limit ourselves to studying the brain of a single person, when most of our daily activities take place in groups? My research interests focus on two-person learning and performance. NeuroLab, my laboratory, adds a psychophysiological perspective (concerning the functioning of the brain and nervous system) to behavioral studies (what can be observed or reported verbally) of affectivity and cognition in situations involving several interacting people. Measuring aspects of brain and nervous system function reveals phenomena related to learning that are impossible to observe otherwise, and that we need to know in order to design better interactive technological tools. Thus, my career revolves around optimizing human-machine interaction for performance and learning. Specialized in applied cognitive sciences, I understand the human being as an “architecture” that functions namely through psychophysiological, cognitive and socio-cognitive processes that maintain dynamic links between them. I am interested in measuring affectivity and cognition in real time (at each instant) during the use of interactive systems, with the aim of explaining learning, performance or user experience.
