Division 21

Call for Papers! APA 2012 in Orlando, FL

October 21, 2011
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A message from the Program Chair: APA Division 21 (Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology) invites submissions for the 2012 Convention of the American Psychological Association, to be held in Orlando, Florida, August 2-5, 2012. Proposals for papers, posters or symposia in areas related to applied experimental/engineering psychology or human factors/ergonomics are encouraged. Broad topics of interest include, but are not [...]

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Calibrating User’s Perception of Automation

August 11, 2011

Last week I had the pleasure of presenting in a symposium on automation in safety critical domains arranged by Dr. Arathi Sethumadhavan at the American Psychological Association annual meeting.  My fellow participants were: Arathi Sethumadhavan, PhD (Medtronic) Poornima Madhavan, PhD (Old Dominion University) Julian Sanchez, PhD (Medtronic) Ericka Rovira, PhD (United States Military Academy) Everyone presented on issues related to human-automation interaction.  I [...]

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Coming to APA 2011: A Conversation Hour on Use of Electronic Health Records in Clinical Practice

August 2, 2011
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Drs. Kelly Caine (of guest post fame)  and Dennis Morrison will be presenting on human factors considerations for the design and use of electronic health records.  Audience participation is welcome as they discuss this important topic. See abstract below. In this conversation hour we will discuss the use of electronic health records in clinical practice. Specifically, we will focus on [...]

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Coming to APA in August: Information Foraging in the Social Web

July 21, 2011
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Peter Pirolli (currently a Research Fellow at Xerox/PARC) will be presenting on Information Foraging Theory. See below for an abstract of his upcoming talk. Information Foraging Theory is a theory of human-information interaction that aims to explain and predict how people will best shape themselves to their information environments, and how information environments can best be shaped to people.  The approach involves [...]

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Hope to see you at APA 2011!

July 17, 2011
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There will be an extensive program for the Applied Experimental Division of the American Psychological Association at their conference in D.C. from August 4-7, and I invite all to come! We’ve collected a who’s-who from established to up-and-coming researchers to bring you cutting edge work in human factors, ergonomics, automation, human machine systems, aviation, video gaming, and much more! Below [...]

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Automation Issues Hit the Big Time on NPR

February 22, 2011

NPR brings home the safety issues of too much cockpit automation. From the NPR story: “It was a fairly busy time of the day. A lot of other airliners were arriving at the same time, which means that air traffic control needed each of us on very specific routes at specific altitudes, very specific air speeds, in order to maintain [...]

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Profiles in Human Factors: Dr. Ron Shapiro

January 28, 2011
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This post is from our series of human factors career profiles. Check them all out if you’re curious about what kinds of careers you can have in this field! Dr. Ron Shapiro received his Ph.D. from Ohio State University. He has had a long career in human factors, including being a visiting Assistant Professor at Denison University, consulting for three years [...]

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Reminder: Proposals due for APA 2011 on Dec. 1st!

November 23, 2010

APA Division 21 (Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology) invites submissions for the 2011 Convention of the American Psychological Association, to be held in Washington, D.C. August 4-7, 2011. Proposals for papers, posters, or symposia in areas related to applied experimental/engineering psychology, or human factors/ergonomics, are encouraged. Broad topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Issues in automation across [...]

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Blogging APA Division 21: “One Thing at a Time” (but over a really long time)

November 21, 2010

I held off for a while writing this post because I wanted to make sure I could include media Dr. John Senders included in his talk. I think you’ll agree it was worth the wait! At the 2010 APA convention, John W. Senders, Ph.D. presented “One Thing at a Time: From Eye Fixations (1951), to Sampling (1954), to Information Theory [...]

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Call for Papers! APA 2011 in Washington D.C.

October 29, 2010
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APA Division 21 (Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology) invites submissions for the 2011 Convention of the American Psychological Association, to be held in Washington, D.C. August 4-7, 2011. Proposals for papers, posters, or symposia in areas related to applied experimental/engineering psychology, or human factors/ergonomics, are encouraged. Broad topics of interest include, but are not limited to: Issues in automation across [...]

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New website for Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology

October 22, 2010

Looks like Division 21 has updated their website. Check it out! An important link to note is the one for a free year of membership in the division. This includes getting the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied. Division 21 holds a program at APA each year as well as a mid year meeting. Here are some of the posts on [...]

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Blogging APA Division 21: The Cost of Automation Failure

August 27, 2010
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Arathi Sethumadhavan, currently of Medtronic and recently of Texas Tech, was this year’s winner of the George E. Briggs dissertation award, for the best dissertation this year in the field of applied experimental psychology. Her advisor was Frank Durso. Her work was inspired by our need to increase automation in aviation, due to increases in air traffic. However, automation does [...]

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Blogging APA Division 21: You’re Looking Harmless Today

August 23, 2010
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I‘m on a plane writing this post and I look harmless, or at least not threatening. According to work presented by Poornima Madhavan from Old Dominion University, being a female in the screening line means I am less likely to be hassled by a false alarm of a screener seeing a threat in my bag.* In work done with her [...]

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Blogging APA Division 21: Maximizing Stimulus-Response Compatibility

August 19, 2010
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Kim-Phuong L. Vu was this year’s winner of the Earl A. Allusi Award for early career achievement. Her presentation covered maximizing stimulus-response compatibility to optimize human performance. Vu reported on her studies of people’s performance under different levels of stimulus-response compatibility. For example, high stimulus response compatibility occurs when a blinking button needs to be pressed. The blinking is the stimulus [...]

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Blogging APA Division 21

August 15, 2010
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I‘m just returning from APA 2010, where the Division of Applied Experimental & Engineering Psychology presented a number of cutting-edge human factors projects. I’m writing individual posts on many of these, so stay tuned! Here is a teaser: “How important is your HF work to the human race?” “Get ready for the pat-down, males!” “Too much help is a dangerous [...]

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