Facilities

Facilities

Three dedicated networked laboratories in the Department of Psychology at KSU are available for exclusive use by the research team. The first is the four-person KANTROL I lab (KANsas Traffic Research Operations Lab; pictured left). This lab is in an open room, so that all operators can see and interact with each other; this facilitates a high level of communication. The second is the eight-person KANTROL II lab (pictured middle-right) set up in a long narrow room that resembles an air traffic control facility; limited communication is possible, primarily between neighboring operators.The third is the four-person CONTROL lab (pictured bottom-left). This lab has four distinct rooms, which creates a non-communicative, distributed decision environment. By running identical scenarios in these labs, we are able to compare the impact of physical proximity on both individual and team performance.

All three labs are set up to run networked microworld programs. Following our agreement with the FAA, no one is allowed access to the program code. To protect the code, all three labs can only be accessed by the our research team and KSU security personnel; no one else, including department staff and janitorial services, has access.

Computers

The research team has complete access to the necessary mainframe and desktop hardware and software at KSU. The hardware includes Ethernet linkage to the UNIX-based mainframe system maintained by KSU, eg, the CWS website (www.ksu.edu/psych/cws) is supported through this system.

The software available for this project includes the simulation routines in Mathematica, as well as the statistical routines in SAS, SPSS, and JMP. In addition, special purpose programs written by members of the research team are available, including CALSTAT (which contains a variety of novel statistical routines), FRACANOV (which allows analysis of partial designs), and CWS-CALC (for computation of the CWS measure of performance).

Other Equipment

The research team has exclusive use of a variety of supporting equipment. We have a portable desktop Pentium for use when we need access to data, analytic routines, etc., while away from our lab. For presentations, we have a portable LCD projector, which has proved invaluable in our prior research. For creating presentation and training materials, we have both a digital camera and a digital camcorder, as well as the necessary editing software. Finally, we can CD creation and copying capability for preparing support materials, as well as permanent backup of essential files.

To read descriptions and view demonstrations of the microworlds used in the laboratories, visit the microworld section of the Web site.

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