Dr. Lisa D Blalock

This study examines how adding scents to a virtual reality (VR) environment impacts immersion, anxiety levels, and mood. Participants ( N = 40), aged 18–44 years with varying levels of VR technology experience, were randomly assigned to either the control (no scent), congruent (i.e., scents that match the visual scene), or incongruent scent conditions. Participants were assessed on changes to mood, anxiety levels, immersion, and performance on a memory recognition task. Results suggest that while the VR experience significantly reduced anxiety and lifted mood, scent did not significantly affect memory performance or immersion in the VR experience. Future directions for research include exploring the use of scent to engage participants more fully in exposure therapies.

Flashcards are a popular study tool, however learner decisions can lower their effectiveness. One such decision is whether or not to drop a concept from study. Using objective mastery criteria that adaptively determine when to add or drop an item from study based on performance may improve learning outcomes in flashcard-based tasks. The effectiveness of adaptive flashcard-based learning may also vary based on the cognitive ability of the learner. The current study examined the impact of adaptive mastery instructional strategies on learning butterfly species and whether or not the impact of adaptive mastery varies by cognitive ability. Three learning conditions were compared: a No Add/Drop group (all items remain in the deck throughout study), a Mastery Drop group (start with all items, then drop after an item ismastered), and a Mastery Add group (start with three items, add items once mastered). A pre-post-transfer test design was used both immediately after training and one week later. Participants also completed the symmetry span task and a change detection task to evaluate cognitive ability. Results show the worst overall immediate pre-post learning gains in the Mastery Drop condition compared to the Mastery Add and No Add/Drop conditions which showed similar learning gains. This pattern went away when looking at delayed pre-post learning gains. Cognitive ability did not have any impact on learning performance, suggesting that similar strategies work equally well across all levels of cognitive ability. These results suggest adaptively adding cards is better than dropping them, though if there are no time constraints, leaving all concepts in the deck leads to the best overall learning in the short term.

While visualization can support understanding complex phenomena, their effectiveness might vary with the recipient’s familiarity with both the phenomenon and the visualization. The current study contrasted interpretations of simulated hurricane paths using student populations from a high frequency hurricane area versus no local hurricane risk. Non-expert understanding of trajectory predictions was supported via two visualizations: common cones of uncertainty and novel dynamic ensembles. General patterns of performance were similar across the two groups. Participants from the high hurricane risk area did show narrower decision thresholds, in both common and novel visualization formats. More variability was consistently considered possible when viewing the dynamic ensemble displays. Despite greater likelihood of experiences with variability of trajectories outside of forecast paths, greater familiarity tended towards narrower interpretations of the need for evacuations within the variability possible. The results suggest an advantage of dynamic ensembles in grasping uncertainty even in populations familiar with hurricanes.

Psychomotor assessment tasks have been shown to be predictive of individual performance in aviation training. Predictive relationships have also been shown between performance in training and cognitive measures such as intelligence, processing speed, and spatial reasoning. The present study seeks to better understand the relationships between basic cognitive measures and a modern psychomotor tracking task. Participants completed a matrix reasoning task, a working memory capacity (WMC) span task, two reaction time tasks and a multiphase psychomotor tracking task. Only processing speed measures were correlated with psychomotor tracking tasks. Results support using psychomotor tracking tasks as a selection tool in addition to aptitude testing.

Situation awareness (SA) was examined while driving in a driving simulator under load or no load conditions. Participants drove through two simulated maps and were periodically interrupted, the driving paused, and were asked questions regarding dynamic (i.e., moving) and static (i.e., non-moving) aspects of the environment. Participants in the load condition also had to count backwards by sevens during the drive. Results indicate that driving under load conditions leads to an overall drop in performance in processing of the dynamic elements of the scene, but no such decrement was observed for the static elements. Implications for current theories of SA and applied attention, as well as the potential relevance to understanding impaired driving performance from cell phone use, are discussed.