Leanne Hirshfield

Professor Leanne Hirshfield is an Associate Research Professor in the Institute of Cognitive Science at University of Colorado, Boulder. Hirshfield directs the System Human Interaction with NIRS and EEG (SHINE) Lab at the University of Colorado. She is also on the leadership team for the NSF AI Institute on Student AI Teaming (iSAT), where she directs human-computer interaction (HCI) research focused on the design, implementation, and evaluation of AI Partners to support group collaboration in classrooms. Hirshfield’s research explores the use of non-invasive neurophysiological measurement (e.g., fNIRS, EEG, eyetracking, heartrate)  to passively classify users’ social, cognitive, and affective states in order to enhance usability testing and adaptive system design, with a focus on human performance and human-agent teaming. Hirshfield has extensive experience using brain measurement to measure states relating to trust, team cohesion, negative affect, and cognitive load. She works primarily with functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), a non-invasive brain imaging device that is safe, portable, robust to noise, and can be implemented wirelessly; making it ideal for research in human-computer interaction.

Select publications

Hirshfield, L.M., Gulotta, B., Hincks, S., Hirshfield, S., Russel, M., Ward, R., Williams, T., and Jacob, R. "This is Your Brain on Interfaces: Enhancing Usability Testing with Functional-Near Infrared Spectroscopy". In the Proceedings of ACM CHI 2011 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference, ACM Press.

G S Rajshekar Reddy, Michael J Proulx, Leanne Hirshfield, and Anthony Ries. 2024. Towards an Eye-Brain-Computer Interface: Combining Gaze with the Stimulus-Preceding Negativity for Target Selections in XR. In Proceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '24). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, Article 376, 1–17.

Caruso, M., R. Southwell, L. Hirshfield and S. D'Mello (2024). Putting the “Brain” Back in the Eye-Mind Link: Aligning Eye Movements and Brain Activations During Naturalistic Reading. Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Multimodal Interaction. San Jose, Costa Rica, Association for Computing Machinery: 407–417.