The Antwerp Social Lab (tASL). (tASL)

The Antwerp Social Lab originated in 2018 from the collaboration between the research groups MIOS and EDUBRON at the faculty of Social Sciences. It merges the expertise, networks, and a portfolio of research projects in which a wide variety of state-of-the-art psychophysiological and behavioral research measures are employed. Although social science research typically relies on selfreport as a way of collecting data from individuals, psychophysiological and behavioral methods allow to gain insights in more direct, spontaneous, and continuous reactions. This allows more fine-grained and complementary insights in complex human processes such as attention, learning and memory, which are important for all types of educational, training and communication domains. Moreover, having accurate and valid affective measures is necessary for the promising AI-field of 'affective computing' whereby an individual, group-based affective and cognitive states are fed into technological systems which then adapts accordingly, allowing for optimized experience or efficacies. The Antwerp Social Lab currently houses state-of-the art infrastructure such as eyetracking to study attention and cognitive processing and electrodermal activity (sweat reactions), facial EMG (activation of facial muscles) and heart rate to capture affective processes such as stress and interest. Topic-wise the Antwerp Social Lab has focused on applying these psychophysiological and behavioral methods to human interactions in interpersonal and mediated contexts, spanning a wide range of application domains (collaboration, learning, strategic communication, media use and effects). The Antwerp Social Lab has the strong ambition to scale up and to make more available its expertise to other groups, faculties, and external partners by facilitating research, providing advice and collaborations. We are convinced that research in the Antwerp Social Lab can provide essential and currently overlooked user insights in the context of acceptance, experience and adoption of a broad range innovations and technologies within various scientific domains, as such contributing to pressing societal and economical challenges.

Keywords:COMMUNICATION, COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGIES, LEARNING, LEARNING PROCESS

Disciplines:Psychophysiology, Research methods and experimental design, Communication research methodology, Human information behaviour