01/07/05
Welcome!
In spite of my
best judgment and due to some serendipitous events I ended up in graduate
school at The Ohio State University working with Rich Jagacinski in 1978.
Six years and two kids later, with strong urging from my wife, I finally
completed the Ph.D. and took a “real” job at the University of Illinois
where I had joint appointments in three departments [Mechanical and
Industrial Engineering (50%), Psychology (25%); and the Institute of
Aviation (25%)]. Although the joint appointments seemed like a good idea
(especially for someone who still wasn’t sure what they wanted to be when
they grew up), I soon learned that I wasn’t up to the task of serving three
masters. In 1990, I failed to get tenure and had to leave Illinois.
Fortunately, I found a home in the Psychology Department at Wright State
University where supportive students and colleagues helped me over the
tenure hurdle and up the academic ladder to the rank of Professor. Most
recently, due to another twist of fate, I became chair of the psych
department. To everyone’s surprise, it hasn’t been a complete catastrophe,
but there’s still time. In addition to chair responsibilities, I teach
graduate and undergraduate courses in the areas of experimental cognitive
psychology and cognitive systems engineering. I particularly enjoy working
with graduate students to explore questions and domains of mutual interest.
My research
stems most directly from my failures at sports, ineptitude with music, and
uneasiness with technology. I came to psychology seeking reasons why things
that seemed to come so easily to others were difficult for me. This has led
me to study general issues of coordination and control in cognitive systems.
Specific research topics have included visual control of locomotion,
graphical interface design, decision-making, manual control, and tactile
displays. Along the way I have learned a little about the domains of
aviation and surgery.
Two
theoretical themes have guided my search. My approach to the stimulus is
guided by J.J. Gibson’s concept of ecology (that was introduced to me by
Dean Owen at OSU) and Jens Rasmussen’s ideas about abstraction and
decomposition. My approach to process is guided by principles of dynamic
control systems analysis that I was introduced to by Rich Jagacinski.
Recently, I have been characterizing the combination of ecological and
control theoretic frameworks as a “search for meaning” or a “meaning
processing” approach to human performance. The key difference relative to
the dominant “information processing” paradigm is to think about meaning as
the “input” or “raw material” of processing, rather than the product of
processing (i.e., interpretation). In other words, the general notion is to
characterize stimuli in terms of functional (i.e., meaningful) constraints
and to think about human behavior as tuning to those constraints. Although
these ideas have been a major force shaping my research program, I am still
struggling to find the appropriate words to articulate this approach to
others.
In the process
of searching for meaning my students and I have stumbled upon some
interesting data, however the search has not solved the original problem – I
remain a clumsy athlete, an inept musician, and am always the last to learn
how to use new technologies.
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