The HUFAC team
The Human Factors and Applied Cognition (HuFAC) laboratory located at the University of Western Australia, Perth. Our research sits at the intersection of cognitive science and human factors and aims to uncover the cognitive mechanisms that underlie human performance in everyday life and in safety-critical work contexts. We conduct both basic experimental psychology research and research using simulations of air traffic control, submarine track management, piloting and driving. This research is complemented by the delivery of human factors consultancy services within Australian and internationally. Some specific research areas of interest include Prospective Memory, Situational Awareness, Conflict Detection, Interruptions and Automation.
The HuFAC laboratory conducts a series of research projects with support from several key government and industry agencies such as the Australian Research Council (ARC), the Defence Science and Technology Group (DSTG), Department of Airforce (Asian Office of Aerospace Research and Development), and the Neurotrauma Research Program (NRP). Check out some of our research projects below.
Many complex workplace tasks require operators to maintain a tactical picture of the environment in face of multiple task demands. We investigate how best to measure situational awareness of this tactical picture, and whether these measures impact on workload.
Increasingly, complex tasks are being automated in order to increase safety. However, what impact do automated systems have on human operators? Our research investigates the how humans respond to automation (and failures of automation) in terms of workload, situational awareness and overall performance.
In modern work environments, interruptions, distractions and multitasking are commonplace. In safety critical workplace settings, this can have serious safety implications. Through the use of basic and complex simulations, our research aims to understand and prevent situations where error may occur from multitasking.
In our everyday lives we often need to defer intended actions until a later time when conditions for their execution are met, this is called prospective memory. We apply theories and methods from basic cognitive tasks to complex workplace simulations, such as air traffic control, where prospective memory errors can be disasterous.
I conduct theory-driven research to uncover the cognitive mechanisms that underlie human performance in everyday life and in safety-critical work contexts. I conduct both basic experimental psychology research and research using air traffic control, submarine track management, piloting and driving simulations. This research is complemented the delivery of consultancy services within Australian and internationally in the aviation, military, and resource sectors. Some specific research areas of interest include Prospective Memory, Situational Awareness, Conflict Detection, Interruptions and Automation. I am currently serving on the Editorial Boards of Human Factors and the Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied.
I am also available to provide human factors consultancy services to industry. I have had extensive experience providing consultancy services at the both the national and international level, in industries such as aviation (air traffic control, airside safety, piloting), military settings (submarine warfare, army, airforce), and resource sectors (gas and mining). Specific examples include human factors consultancy services delivered to:
My research interests lie in the field of applied psychology and in using psychological principles to improve our understanding of how people complete a range of important everyday tasks. One topic I am particularly interested in is improving driver safety on the road and I am currently involved in projects aimed at training both new and experienced drivers in a simulator environment. I am also involved in research on prospective memory, situation awareness in complex tasks, human visual perception, and using eye-tracking technology to improve our understanding of how attention is allocated.
I am currently involved in DST-Group (Defence, Science and Technology – Group) research projects investigating the impact of automation and intelligent agents on overall task performance, situation awareness, and attention in the context of unmanned, autonomous vehicles (DST-Aerospace) and submarine track management (DST-Maritime). I am passionate about the development and application of virtual reality technology to solve real world problems such as in Defence and in the examination of prospective memory performance. In my free time, I enjoy 3D modeling in Blender, programming games, mocking simulations in Unity and C#, playing around with macros in Excel VBA (Visual Basic for Applications) and web development.
I am a Research Assistant for Professor Shayne Loft, assisting with the submarine track management project and other tasks. I am also completing a Masters in Industrial and Organisational Psychology at UWA.
I am a PhD student under the supervision of Shayne Loft and Andrew Heathcote. My research applies computational cognitive models of decision-making to a complex and dynamic Air-Traffic Control (ATC) task. My work aims to explain how individuals adapt decision-making strategies in response to changes task-level factors such as time pressure and prospective memory demands as well as stimulus-level factors such as decision complexity and the amount of information to be processed. My research seeks to further our understanding of how characteristics of the task environment interact with stimulus-level factors to affect decision-making performance in safety-critical contexts. I am broadly interested in bringing computational cognitive models ‘out of the lab’ and applying them to the more realistic applied tasks used in aviation, road safety, and defence research.
I am a PhD student under the supervision of Shayne Loft, Vanessa Bowden, and Troy Visser. My research seeks to evaluate how automation influences operator performance in complex dynamic control tasks. Specifically, my research aims to examine how best to design automation to maximize performance in submarine track management whilst ensuring that operators maintain appropriate situation awareness to be able to regain manual control of tasks if required. I am broadly interested in automation, situation awareness, and driver safety.