Faculty Research

 Minnesota Interdisciplinary Training in Education Research

     The Minnesota Interdisciplinary Training in Education Research (MITER) Program is designed to develop education researchers whose work will place them at the forefront of research and academic endeavors worldwide. The MITER Program focuses on experimental research design, statistical methods, and cognitive science, as applied to educational issues. For more information, visit the MITER Program Web site: http://education.umn.edu/MITER.

 Perception and Action:  HumanFIRST Program

     To improve traffic safety, we need to understand how drivers perceive traffic and modulate their actions with respect to perceived risk. Nic Ward's lab has recently completed research on the effects of driving difficulty and attention to common in-vehicle tasks such as operating the car entertainment system. Research has shown that driver behavior becomes less coherent when driving is more difficult and the driver is distracted from paying full attention to the dynamic driving scene.

 Affordance Perception-Action Laboratory (APAL)

    In an NSF-funded study, Tom Stoffregen and his students are investigating functional relations between body sway and visual performance. Standing subjects perform simple visual tasks (e.g., signal detection, using eye movements to follow a moving target, or searching for target letters in a block of text). Previous research has shown that body sway is influenced by the presence and nature of visual tasks. Put simply, the amount of sway (excursion of body movement) is reduced durng performance of tasks that require precise control of the eyes, relative to sway during the performance of non-demanding visual tasks (e.g., stationary fixation).

     The changes in sway are functional in the sense that they make it easier for the visual system to achieve clear vision of the task targets. Of course, people are not aware of their sway, in general, or of the fact that these adaptive changes are taking place. The research may have practical relevance (for example) in the realm of virtal reality systems. Body sway has no influence on our ability to see imagery in head-mounted display systems, thereby eliminating the natural link between sway and visual performance. This may account, in part, for the fact that head-mounted display systems often are associated with headache, eyestrain, and other forms of visuomotor fatigue.