I have
been working with Dr. Greg Trafton and his doctoral students, Kevin Zish and
Dan Gartenberg, in the Predicting Cognition Lab for two years. We conduct experimental
cognitive and human factors research on topics such as sustained attention,
interruptions and resumptions, procedural errors, uncertainty, and supervisory
control. After taking a course in cognitive science, I became very interested
in cognitive and human factors research and decided to get involved in the
research process.
The
experiment that I am currently conducting aims to investigate the cognitive
processes involved as people make certainty judgments while performing a
computerized procedural task. Moreover, we are interested in understanding how people’s
certainty judgments relate to their measured performance on the procedural
task. We use state-of-the-art research methods, such as eye trackers, to identify
and explore cognitive mechanisms.
As a
research assistant, I collect and analyze data from human participants for my
experiment, conduct literature reviews, and attend weekly lab meetings to
discuss our research findings and data analysis methods. Using R programming
language, I run statistical analyses and create visualizations of our data to
help us interpret the results. This past week, I learned how to perform a
logistic regression model in R to predict whether or not people will make an
error during a procedural task based on their eye fixations.
My
experience in the research lab has helped me develop an appreciation and
passion for cognitive science, experimental design, and statistics. In the
future, I plan to continue engaging in research by applying to Ph.D. programs
in the cognitive and human factors field.
