Frank Durso

Most of my current research would fall under the labels applied cognition or cognitive ergonomics: how cognition (e.g., knowledge, expertise, working memory, attention allocation, strategy selection) interacts with environmental components (e.g., technology, the representation of flight data, available automation, patient symptoms, presence of teammates) to affect the operator's performance, learning, transfer, workload, situation awareness, and strategic thinking. Current and imminent projects include: (1) An investigation of strategy use and selection in dynamic environments focused on critical care nurses. Our hope is to develop a methodology that allows easy elicitation of strategies from experts; to articulate how strategy selection is used to protect situation comprehension, workload, and performance; and to train novices in these expert strategies. (2) An archival study of the cognitive factors underlying rail accidents. (3) A series of experiments trying to determine the conditions to obtain"and eliminate"the vigilance decrement in dynamic environments like air traffic control. (4) Producing a Handbook of Human-Systems Integration . Student led projects are looking into taxonomies of human error, the psychometrics of situation awareness, complex prospective memory, predictive aiding in railway automation, the role of familiarity in driving SA, and a comparison of electronic inks. Undergraduate senior theses are in progress on cell-phone addiction, cognitive structure underlying learning through metaphor, and operator attributions when working with automation.