The University of Edinburgh is listed among the top 50 Universities in the world. Founded in 1582, It is a research intensive University, and is a member of the League of European Research Universities, of the international network of leading research universities Universitas 21, and of the Russell Group of the 20 major research universities in the UK. It has an annual turnover of around €800 Million, €210 million of which is from research grants and contracts. Within the University of Edinburgh, the Research Centre for Cognitive Ageing and Cognitive Epidemiology (CCACE) is jointly funded by several UK government research councils and major UK charities to study changes in cognition across the lifespan. It comprises 59 researchers, 8 technical and clerical support staff, and a community of around 40 Masters and PhD students. Total funding is currently around €16 million. CCACE is multidisciplinary, drawing on cognitive psychology, genetics, statistics, molecular biology, systems neuroscience, neurology, neuroradiology, neuropsychology, neuroendocrinology and epidemiology. Professor Logie leads the Human Cognitive Neuroscience Group which was first established in 2004 when Professor Logie moved to the University of Edinburgh. The group became associated with the newly formed CCACE in 2009. A major focus for the Human Cognitive Neuroscience Group is on which cognitive abilities tend to decline most rapidly and which tend to be preserved into old age, as well as how different cognitive functions are affected by brain damage. A closely related activity is the development of theories of human cognition, and specifically of human memory and human forgetting.
The Human Cognitive Neuroscience Group at the University of Edinburgh will have a major role in conducting a systematic review of current theoretical conceptual models of forgetting in biological systems (human and animal), of identifying the characteristics that have evolved in biological systems to optimise the selection and organisation of information, and of developing a conceptual model that might be applied to optimise preservation and managed forgetting in data storage systems. This will focus on WP2 to assess the match between how an individual remembers personal information and how they use external electronic information storage to complement their biological memory. Additional contributions will be made to WP3, WP5, WP9 and WP10 for development, and user evaluation of ForgetIT personal and organisational preservation systems. As with other partners, there will be contributions to WP 11 for dissemination.
Robert Logie obtained his PhD in Psychology from University College London in 1981, and trained as a post doctoral researcher at the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, UK 1980-1986. He was then appointed to a tenured University Lectureship at the University of Aberdeen, UK, and became a full professor of Psychology in 1995. He was Head of the Psychology Department at the University of Aberdeen 1997-2002 and editor-in-chief of the prime UK-based journal in experimental psychology, the Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology 2002-2005. He moved to a full professor position at the University of Edinburgh in 2004 to establish a new group in Human Cognitive Neuroscience in collaboration with Professor Sergio Della Sala. This group has now grown to 15 tenured academic researchers, plus a community of over 40 PhD and MSc students focused on healthy human cognition, cognitive ageing, and cognitive impairments following stroke and brain diseases, including the dementias. Professor Logie's research approach is multidisciplinary encompassing experimental psychology, neurology, neuropsychology, and computing science. His interests lie primarily in the cognition of human memory in the healthy, ageing, and damaged brain. He develops cognitive theories driven by experimental evidence from studies of human adult memory, and undertakes applied research using theories of human cognition in the design of, for example, human-computer interfaces for medical monitoring systems. He has generated over 220 international scientific publications and has an 'h index' of 40. He is regularly approached by the print and broadcast media in the UK and internationally as an expert consultant on human memory. He has organised several major (>500 delegates) and numerous smaller international scientific conferences, is associate editor for the journal 'Applied Cognitive Psychology', and on the editorial board for the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, of the Royal Society for Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, and of the British Psychological Society. He currently serves as an elected member of the governing board of the USA-based Psychonomics Society.
Dr Maria Wolters specialises in human-computer interaction research. She is a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Informatics and a Research Scientist at the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences (both University of Edinburgh). Dr Wolters has a keen interest in eHealth, speech and language technology, and clinical phonetics. She is Scientific Coordinator of the EU FP7 STREP Help4Mood, on the editorial board of Interacting with Computers, and has served on the programme committees for several international conferences and workshops, including CHI 2014, ASSETS 2014, and CHI 2015. She has published over 40 peer-reviewed papers.
Elaine Niven is a cognitive psychologist and a postdoctoral researcher at the School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences. Her research covers working memory and cognition in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.
The ForgetIT project is funded by the EC within the 7th Framework Programme under the objective "Digital Preservation" (GA 600826).