ESRC Festival of Social Science event, October 2024

Back in October last year the Applied Cognition group were part of an event at the Salford Museum and Art gallery called “Our Digital Lives“. In the event we showcased our research into the ways in which the environment can impact how we process and engage with our surroundings.

We explored how social contact and interaction with the environment can be beneficial for cognition. We also looked at how digital media can be used by companies in unscrupulous ways to trap us in subscriptions.

Visitors had the opportunity to ask questions and take part in demonstrations of different phenomena. This included exploration of how people felt about natural environments, with people telling us about their experiences of nature in Greater Manchester, and rating different environments on how much they liked looking at them vs wanted to be in them. This work related to our recently published Salford Natural Environments Database. People also had the opportunity to take part in a virtual memory task with a virtual human, and to try and escape from an unscrupulous hotel to help demonstrate deceptive design.