Lynda Joy Gerry is a researcher and software developer employing methods from psychology and cognitive neuroscience to test the impacts of embodied interfaces in virtual environments on learning, cooperation, and empathy. Her goal is to cultivate “augmented social cognition” by using virtual environments to enhance our abilities to understand one another through embodied interfaces created based on theoretical models of empathy from neuroscience and psychology. In 2016, she created Paint With Me, an expert-novice skills transmission designed to motivate and teach users to paint in a mixed reality setup wherein users see and hear from the point of view of a painter describing her creative process while painting along with her on their own physical canvas. Motion tracking and adaptive visual feedback and made this system effective for the teaching of creative, fine-motor skills. Moreover, synchronously performing a joint action while sharing a first-person perspective was correlated with greater empathic accuracy. Lynda obtained her MA from University of Copenhagen in 2017, with a thesis titled “Virtual Reality as a Tool to Facilitate Empathy”, in Cognition and Communication with coursework and supervision from The Center for Subjectivity Research. Lynda also worked in the Empathic Computing Lab at University of South Australia with Brain-Computer Interfaces in virtual environments and created an augmented reality version of The Machine to Be Another body swap called First-Person Squared. Her main research interests include enactivism, embodiment, empathy, bodily self-consciousness, sense of agency, and intersubjectivity. (Enactive Virtuality group member 04/–08/2018)
Currently Lynda is a PhD student at the Aalborg University, Copenhagen. See her recent publication Schoeller Felix, Bertrand Philippe, Gerry Lynda Joy, Jain Abhinandan, Horowitz Adam Haar, Zenasni Franck. (2019). Combining Virtual Reality and Biofeedback to Foster Empathic Abilities in Humans. Frontiers in Psychology 9: 2741 doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.02741 affiliated to Enactive Virtuality Lab.