WELCOME TO THE APPLIED DECISION  MAKING LAB

What aspects of  decision making are we interested in? 

• How do humans acquire skills, store and retrieve knowledge from memory, and develop their decision making strategies over time?
• How can automation be designed and implemented to assist human decision making?          

     Where can our research be  applied? 

         Environments characterized by:

                High levels of time pressure, stress, organizational constraints, uncertainty; 

                Rapidly changing (often deteriorating) environmental conditions;

                Critical (and sometimes fatal) consequences for errors and suboptimal decisions;

                Teamwork and coordinated decision making among multiple operators.

     Some examples are....

       So exactly what do we study?

                                                                                                                                                    I. DECISION STRATEGIES         

•     How does tactical decision making differ from strategic decision making?
•     Do exemplar-based learning methods lead to the development of better (or worse) decision making skills than rule-based methods?
•     How do individual differences (age, gender, personality) influence the development of decision strategies?
•     How do target base rates influence learning and decision making in vigilance tasks? 
•     How can human decision making be augmented by environmental design interventions?

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                                                                                       II. AUTOMATED DECISION SUPPORT SYSTEMS

•     What factors influence trust in and utilization of automated decision support systems?
•     Do the biases and heuristics that guide everyday decision making influence human "relationship" with technology?
•     How do individual differences influence automation use? Conversely, what features make some systems "easier to use" than others?
•     How can adaptive automation improve decision making?                                                                                                             

                                                                                     CURRENT LAB MEMBERS

         Graduate Students

        (Ph.D program in Human Factors)

• Jeremy Brown
• Felix Portnoy
• Randall Spain

         (M.S. program in Experimental Psychology)

• Patricia Brennan
• Rachel Phillips

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          Lab Assistants

• Molly Crisman-Liechty
• Richard Ekelman

                                                                                   Interested in joining our lab? Click here! 

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