Applied Psychology Program

About the Applied Psychology Program

What's New:

Student News

Jasmine Duran has been awarded a Bridge to the Doctorate fellowship from the National Science Foundation. Congratulations Jasmine!

Rayka Mohebbi, Stacie Straghn and Takao Sasaki successfully defended their master's theses. Congratulations gang!


Faculty and Staff News

Please welcome our new Office Specialist, Petie Roberts!

Dr. Dee Andrews has been named an Air Force Research Laboratory Fellow. This is the highest honor bestowed upon AFRL scientists and engineers.

Dr. Vaughn Becker was one of three finalists for the research award at the Human Behavior and Evolution Society meeting in Kyoto, Japan.

Dr. Russell Branaghan received a contract from Motorola to study decision making among police officers during high risk situations. The work is in collaboration with John Takamura and Prasad Boradker in Industrial Design.

Dr. Russell Branaghan has been invited to deliver a workshop (with Motorola's Mark Palmer) entitled Hours of Boredom, Moments of Terror at the Annual Meeting of the International Association of Chiefs of Police in San Diego.

Dr. Nancy Cooke and Dr. Eduardo Salas (University of Central Florida) recently published Best of Human Factors: Thirty Classic Contributions to Human Factors/Ergonomics Science and Engineering.

Dr. Nancy Cooke was awarded a one-year grant from the Leonard Wood Institute to support a project on  "Harnessing Human IED (Improvised Explosive Device) Emplacement Detection Expertise"  in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon and Battelle.

Dr. Nancy Cooke has been invited to deliver the keynote lecture at the Humans Operating Unmanned Systems conference in Brest, France.

Recent Publications and Presentations

The theories and methods of experimental psychology and cognitive science can be applied to many domains, making products easier to use, making work places more productive, improving the way products are sold, improving sports performance and improving the way we learn and teach. If you are interested in human perception, cognition, innovation or group processes then you may want to learn about applied psychology. Our program is hands-on, and challenging, and the field is growing quickly, creating opportunities for further study and employment. Our areas of application include:

Human Factors

  • Team training (Cooke)
  • Driving, driver distraction, collision avoidance and accident analysis (Gray)
  • Multi-sensory displays (Gray)
  • Aviation, UAV, cockpit displays and flight simulators (Schvaneveldt, Gray, Cooke, Branaghan)
  • Small screen displays for GPS and mobile phones (Sanchez and Branaghan)
  • Cognitive models for language understanding and decision making in intelligent agents (Schvaneveldt)
  • Pathfinder Network software (Schvaneveldt)

Consumer Psychology

  • Psychology in product design (Branaghan)
  • Innovation and abductive reasoning (Schvaneveldt)
  • Brand personality (Branaghan)

Sports Psychology

  • Perceptual processes in baseball batting (Gray)
  • Team effectiveness (Cooke)
  • Training and coaching in sports (Gray)

Learning and Design

  • Science literacy (Sanchez)
  • Effectiveness of various educational interfaces (Sanchez)
  • Tools to maximize learning and ease of use (Sanchez)
  • Spatial and attentional abilities, and their influence on learning scientific topics from different web-interfaces and visualizations (Sanchez)