K-State Department of Psychology Research: Cognitive/Human Factors

Areas of expertise in our division include judgment and decision making (Shanteau & Brase), social and statistical reasoning (Brase), psycholinguistics and bilingualism (Harris & Loschky), visual cognition (Loschky), media cognition (Harris), and human-computer interaction (Shanteau & Loschky).

 

Judgment and Decision Making & Social and Statistical Reasoning

Dr. Gary Brase does research on human reasoning, judgments, and decision making.  His work focuses on how evolutionary considerations can illuminate the processes behind how people use different types of information to make inferences and conclusions.  Some current projects in this area include:

• How people understand and work with numbers differently depending on how they are presented (for example, as frequencies, percentages, fractions, or single-event probabilities).

• How people evaluate social situations such as exchanges, precautions, threats, and group memberships.

• How people make decisions in interpersonal relationships, including things such as if and when to have children, judgments of attractiveness and estimating mate values.

Dr. Gary Brase (gbrase@ksu.edu) has additional information concerning this research.

 

Media Cognition, Psycholinguistics & Bilingualism

Dr. Richard Harris does research (both applied and basic) examining issues involving psycholinguistics and mass communication. Current research includes:

• Autobiographical Memory for Media Experiences: People's memories for their own experiences of consuming media (e.g., watching a movie), including the social experience of the thoughts and emotions remembered as well as the consequences of viewing. 

• Social Movie Quoting in Conversations: How and why people quote movie lines in social conversation.

• Language Processing in Bilinguals: The effects of stress and working memory capacity on drawing of inferences from text by foreign language learners and acquisition of word meanings in code-switched text.

• Comprehension of Subtitled Film: Understanding information contained in dialogue and/or subtitles in film, examining various combinations of familiar and unfamiliar languages in the soundtrack and captions.

Dr. Richard Harris (rjharris@ksu.edu) has additional information concerning this research.

 

Visual Cognition, Human-Computer Interaction & Psycholinguistics

Dr. Lester Loschky does visual cognition research.  His primary interests are in three areas: real world scene perception, human-computer interaction, and reading comprehension.  A unifying thread through these areas is a focus on the interactions between perception, attention, memory, and comprehension processes. 

• Research topics in scene perception have included:

• How people can rapidly categorize a scene within a single eye fixation 

• What draws people’s attention in scenes, and how that changes from moment-to-moment

• What people remember from scenes, and how that is related to their eye movements

• Research in human-computer interaction has focused on the dynamics of computer displays that change based on where you look (gaze-contingent displays).

• Research on reading comprehension (together with Dr. Harris) has investigated how stress and working memory capacity affect foreign language inference generation.

Dr. Lester Loschky (loschky@ksu.edu) [Lab Website] has additional information concerning this research.

 

Judgment and Decision Making & Human-Computer Interaction

Dr. James Shanteau does research on judgment and decision making, including analyses of expertise in decision makers (including air traffic control) and studies of consumer health-care choices (especially organ donation / transplantation decisions). His research has been supported by grants from agencies such as the Division of Organ Transplantation and the Federal Aviation Administration. Dr. Shanteau also co-developed the CWS (Cochran-Weiss-Shanteau) index of performance to evaluate expert behavior. CWS employs a ratio of discrimination to inconsistency within a set of judgments, to assess performance. CWS has been applied to study expertise in auditing judgments, livestock judging, personnel selection, nursing diagnosis, medical decision making, and low-fidelity and high fidelity simulations of air traffic control (ATC).

Dr. James Shanteau (shanteau@ksu.edu) [CWS Website] has additional information concerning this research.