Applied Psychology Research

Students and faculty in the Applied Psychology Program are engaged in a wide variety of research activities. The program is home to the Cognitive Engineering Research on Team Tasks Lab, the Perception & Action Lab and the Cognitive Engineering Laboratory. Researchers in our unit also collaborate with local research groups including the Mesa Air Force Research Laboratory, the Human Interface Lab at Motorola, Sandia Research, the Cognitive Engineering Research Institute and Intel Corporation.

Some of the specific project areas include:

Our program was recently featured in ASU Research magazine: The Human Factor, A Dose of Reality, and Appetite for Flight.

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PSY 399 Research Opportunities

The Applied Psychology program offers advanced undergraduates the opportunity to participate in directed research through PSY 399. The goal of this opportunity is to give you first hand experience in conducting and designing research, collecting data, analyzing data and potentially publishing research. If you plan on going to graduate school in any field, this kind of research experience looks very good on your curriculum vita (resume).

To participate in directed research, you must enroll in PSY 399. In PSY 399, you commit three hours of your time every week for every one hour of enrolled credit. For example, if you were to enroll for three hours of PSY 399 credit, you would be expected to devote nine hours a week in a faculty member's research lab. Please understand the enrollment in PSY 399 is subject to instructor approval, so you must have permission from the appropriate faculty member to enroll under their name. Below, you will find several available opportunities for PSY 399. If you are interested in any of the following opportunities, please get in touch with the listed contact person to set up an interview.

These opportunities are all still available for Fall 2007:

1. Synthetic Teammate Study. Work as part of a research team on a project to design a synthetic teammate to interact with two human team members in an unmanned aerial vehicle simulation. The research assistant would help with literature review, setting up experimental materials, testing current software and procedures, scheduling participants, and collecting data.
   Contact: Dr. Nancy Cooke (ncooke@asu.edu)
   
   
2. Collaboration Scenario Exercise. Work as part of a research team to help design a simulation environment to support a variety of collaborative planning exercises. The research assistant would help develop and test scenario materials and work on experimental designs and measures using the completed scenarios.
   Contact:Dr. Nancy Cooke (ncooke@asu.edu)
   
   
3. Individual Differences and Design. Work as an experimenter in several research projects that are investigating how different people's abilities (i.e., attention, memory, spatial ability) impact their learning from different technologies. The research assistant will assist in collecting data, helping design experiments and analyzing data.
   Contact: Dr. Christopher Sanchez (c.sanchez@asu.edu)
   
   
4. User Experience Inventory. Companies have grown interested in understanding how to measure how good or bad a person’s experience is with a product or service. The Innovation Value Institute – a consortium of organizations including Intel, Microsoft, IBM and ASU – have asked us to work on creating a valid and reliable measurement tool to quantify user experiences. You will work with our research team to construct this scale.
   Contact: Dr. Russell Branaghan (russ.branaghan@asu.edu)
   
   
5. Non-conscious and automatic processes in cognition. We do not have conscious awareness of all of the things that influence our behavior. In this research, our team explores how non-conscious influences can affect our behavior, and the implications of these influences on personal choice.
   Contact: Dr. Russell Branaghan (russ.branaghan@asu.edu)

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