Successful sciences usually spawn successful applications and application disciplines; in fact, one is suspicious of a science that can't claim practical results. The na ve view is that results from the science are "applied" to problems, as in an "applied cognitive psychology," for example. The truth is more complex in general and it is particularly more complex for cognitive science. New advances in technology are amplifying still further the human role of informavore and the need for cognitive engineering and invention of cognitive products and government activities. The ability to meet these is a test of a cognitive engineering discipline and of the supporting sciences themselves. I am going to suggest some principles for organizing both cognitive science and the practical innovation around it by reflecting on what we have learned about using cognitive psychology in human-computer interaction. I will use this analysis to suggest a set of initiatives now within reach of the cognitive science community.

Eye movement based analysis is becoming ever prevalent across domains with the commoditization of eye-tracking hardware. Eye-tracking datasets are, however, often complex and difficult to interpret and map to higher-level visual-cognitive behavior. Practitioners using eye tracking need tools to explore, characterize and quantify patterned structures in eye movements. In this paper, we introduce the VERP (Visualization of Eye movements with Recurrence Plots) Explorer, an interactive visual analysis tool for exploring eye movements during visual-cognitive tasks. The VERP Explorer VERP Explorer couples conventional visualizations of eye movements with recurrence plots recurrence plots that reveal patterns of revisitation over time. We apply the VERP Explorer to the domain of medical checklist design checklist design , analyzing eye movements of doctors searching for information in checklists under time pressure.

Helping students wandering in the land of the mind to work, finish, publish, become famous, have impact, win prizes, and reflect glory on their thesis advisors.

Complex, perilous domains like surgery and aviation require accurate responses under extreme time constraints. Checklists improve important outcomes in these domains. However, current designs are based largely on intuition; there is little theory or empirical work about designing effective procedure aids. Furthermore, discretionary checklist use is fragmented and bursty rather than predictable and continuous. Working with doctors and studying successful aids, we developed the RapidRead design approach. It distills three patterns for designing rapidly readable aids: Dynamic Focus, Object-Action, and Information Patches. Two experiments compared medical professionals' search time, eye-gaze, and retention with alternative checklist designs. Applying RapidRead patterns resulted in significantly faster aid usage, reducing answer time and importantly minimizing the frequency of slow responses to medical queries.

Checklist usage can increase performance in complex, high-risk domains. While paper checklists are valuable, they are static, slow to access, and show both too much and too little information. We introduce Dynamic Procedure Aids to address four key problems in checklist usage: ready access to aids, rapid assimilation of content, professional acceptance, and limited attention. To understand their efficacy for crisis response, we created the dpAid software system. Its design arose through a multi-year participation in medical crisis response training featuring realistic team simulations. A study comparing Dynamic Procedure Aids, paper, and no aid, found that participants with Dynamic Procedure Aids performed significantly better than with paper or no aid. This study introduces the narrative simulation paradigm for comparatively assessing expert procedural performance through a score-and-correct approach.

Cognitive aids such as checklists have been shown to benefit medical teams working in routine and crisis environments. This video presents a team of physicians reacting to a simulated operating room emergency, demonstrating potential benefits of interactive cognitive aids in medicine.

Emergency medical teams collaborate to solve problems and take care of patients under time pressure and high cognitive load, in noisy and complex environments. This paper presents preliminary work in the design and evaluation of head-mounted and multi-surface displays in supporting teams with interactive checklists and more generally dynamic cognitive aids.