K-State Department of Psychology Research: Cognitive/Human Factors
Visual Perception and Human-Computer Interaction
Dr. Lester Loschky does research in visual perception that investigates scene perception, from both a perceptual and a cognitive viewpoint, and its real world applications. This research investigates how we perceive, attend to, and remember scenes and the objects in them. The scope of this research can best be understood in terms of the time course of perception and mental representation of a scene. First, how is it that within the first tenth of a second of viewing a scene we are able to grasp its category, so we can easily distinguish an office versus a parking lot versus a street? Next, as we proceed to observe such a scene, what causes us to attend to and look at certain objects, and to ignore others? Then, what effect does attending to and looking at a particular object in a scene, for example a coffee mug, have on our later memory for that object versus other objects in the scene, for example a PalmPilot? In sum this research on scene perception has involved the following research topics:
- Scene gist recognition
- Attention in scenes
- Memory for scenes
Research in human-computer interaction has investigated issues related to gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays. These are computer displays, for example virtual reality or simulators, that use an eye tracker to identify where the viewer is looking, and put the highest image resolution wherever the viewer looks, with lower resolution everywhere else, in order to save processing resources and bandwidth.This applied work has led to investigating fundamental interactions between visual perception and action, in particular how the limits of visual resolution affect attentional selection and eye movement control.Likewise, basic research on scene gist recognition has been done in collaboration with electrical and computer engineers with the goal of informing artificial vision systems, to improve automated image searching on the internet, and to aid in text summarization and machine translation of hypertext that contains images. In sum, research in human-computer interaction has thus investigated the following topics:
Gaze-contingent multi-resolutional displays
Machine-based image gisting and scene classification
Dr. Lester Loschky has additional information concerning this research.
Judgment and Decision Making
Dr. James Shanteau does decision making research, funded by the FAA, that has incorporated the CWS index of performance to evaluate expert performance. CWS employs a ratio, in this case the ratio of discrimination to inconsistency within a set of judgments, to assess the performance of experts. CWS has been applied to experts in:
- Auditing
- Livestock judging
- Personnel selection
- Low-fidelity and high fidelity simulations of air traffic control (ATC)
Dr. James Shanteau has additional information concerning this research.
Psychology of Language
Dr. Richard Harris does research (both applied and basic) examining issues involving language and cognition, primarily psycholinguistics and mass communication. Currently research includes the following:
Autobiographical Memory for Media Experiences: This project assesses people's memory for their own experiences of consuming media (e.g., watching a movie). This research also examines the social experience of the thoughts and emotions remembered as well as the consequences of viewing that are remembered. This project has looked at violent and romantic movies, sporting events, portrayals of minority groups, the social quoting of movie lines, messages about tobacco use and responsible sexuality, and priming effects of thinking about a media personality.
Comprehension and Memory for Figurative Language: Memory and comprehension studies using a variety of methodologies have compared metaphors such as "Submarines are whales" and similes such as "Submarines are like whales". Other studies have examined figurative language.
Studies of Language Processing in Languages other than English and in Bilinguals: Studies of language comprehension and memory for materials in Spanish and other languages, as well as English, have been conducted. Information processing in bilinguals has also been studied, particularly Spanish-English speakers, and processing of words that are either cognates or false cognates across two languages. Other projects have looked at the effects of stress and looking memory capacity on the drawing of influences from text by foreign language learners, comprehension of information in subtitled and close-captioned movies, and acquisition of word meanings in code-switched text.
Dr. Richard Harris has additional information concerning this research.
Social and Statistical Reasoning
Dr. Gary Brase does research on human reasoning that looks at how people use existing information to come to conclusions and make decisions. For example, how do people evaluate a social situation, come to conclusions about what is going on, and decide how to act? Similarly, how do people understand statistical information and use it to make conclusions or decisions?
Current research at K-State in this area includes:
a) How people evaluate statements about situations such as exchanges, precautions, threats, and group memberships – statements that can be evaluated in terms of methods like formal logic or evaluated in more adaptively specialized ways.
b) How people understand and work with numbers differently depending on how they are presented (for example, as frequencies, percentages, fractions, or single-event probabilities
c) How people reason about and make social decisions such as whether to take an immediate, smaller reward or wait for a larger reward after some delay, whether or not (and when) to have children, and evaluating romantic relationships.
Dr. Gary Brase has additional information concerning this research.
