The power of cognitive psychology lies in the promise of cognitive technology.
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The power of cognitive psychology lies in the promise of cognitive technology.
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Abstracts - Fall 2001
EDITORIAL 4 Cognitive Technology's Contribution to Cognitive Psychology: The Optimization of Discovery and Application THEORETICAL AND RESEARCH ARTICLES 7 Policy-Driven Research: A Growth Area in Applied Cognition 15 External Memory Aids and the Use of Personal Data Assistants in Improving Everyday Memory 26 Expanding Cognition Laboratory Methods to Test Self-Administered Questionnaires 33 Event-based Prospective Memory is Insensitive to Short-term Memory Load: 41 Effects of Mild Alcohol Intoxication upon Driver's Eye Movements
Cognitive Technology's Contribution to Cognitive Psychology: The Optimization of Discovery and Application Cognitive Technology is sponsored by the Society for Applied Research on Memory and Cognition and the Society for Cognitive Rehabilitation. It is currently published by the Practical Memory Institute, a subsidiary of Compact Disc, Inc. and printed at Indiana State University, Terre Haute, Indiana. The article below is essentially the same as was published in the first issue of Cognitive Technology, with some revisions to bring the article up to date.
Policy-Driven Research: A Growth Area in Applied Cognition The new political climate has made policy-driven research one of the major growth areas of applied cognitive psychology. It offers great opportunities for applying psychology, but it also has pitfalls and difficulties. The experiences of the author in learning these lessons the hard way in two major areas of policy-driven research - eyewitness testimony and children in the courtroom - are described. In order to provide convincing and reliable answers, cognitively trained researchers may need to shed their adherence to balanced experimental designs and an exclusive reliance upon quantitative methods, but they should be careful not to lose their integrity.
External Memory Aids and the Use of Personal Data Assistants in Improving Everyday Memory Two experiments investigated the use of external memory aids among college students. Participants in Experiment 1 reported frequent use of external memory aids, particularly electronic devices (e.g., cell phones, pagers). Experiment 2 tracked two groups of students for 6 weeks. The first group was given personal data assistants (PDAs) to use during the 6-week period. The second group served as controls. The use of PDAs increased memory for telephone numbers and weekly schedules, but did not affect other memory tests. Course attendance records indicated that the PDA group missed fewer days than the control group. These results suggest that students prefer to use external memory aids and that the use of such devices can be linked to gains in everyday memory.
Expanding Cognitive Laboratory Methods to Test Self-Administered Questionnaires Using methods adapted from cognitive psychology to develop and test survey questions seems to be effective in reducing measurement error associated with questionnaire design problems. Early research into the cognitive aspects of survey methodology was done using household surveys administered by personal interviewer visits. This led to an emphasis on refining and advancing cognitive interview techniques when conducting personal, face-to-face interviews. To some, it intuitively makes sense to conduct cognitive interviews in person (face-to-face) since this mode of administration may lend itself best to studying the response process. This leads some questionnaire design researchers to assume that the planned mode of survey interview (data collection) does not need to match the mode of cognitive interview pretesting. Thus, the protocols used to design pretests in survey research often utilize modes that differ from the mode of survey administration. This paper addresses the theoretical framework underlying cognitive interviews and examines the effects that mode of survey administration can have on the selection of pretesting methods. Emerging laboratory methods used by a variety of statistical agencies and survey research centers are described. Results are presented from collaborative investigations which have sought to develop and demonstrate new laboratory research methods used to design and test survey instruments that are self-administered.
Event-based Prospective Memory is Insensitive to Short-term Memory Load: Some Observations on Automaticity and Monitoring In one experiment we investigated the effect of short-term memory load on an event-based prospective memory task (background task) and on a letter-matching task (ongoing task). Participants were presented with strings of five letters and were asked to decide whether the second and fourth letters in each string were the same or different (letter-matching task). They were also required to press the spacebar whenever one or both of these letters was the letter "B" (prospective memory task). There were eight blocks of 30 trials each. In addition to the ongoing and prospective memory task, at the beginning of each block, participants were required to memorize either 7 digits (high load) or 1 digit (low load) that were to be reported at the end of each block (short-term memory task). That is, although the digits were to be kept in mind during the ongoing task, the STM task (digit recall) was not performed concurrently with the ongoing and the PM tasks. Results showed no effects of short-term memory load on prospective memory performance. However, response times in the ongoing letter-matching task increased with high memory load only in the absence of the PM task. When the PM task was present, response times in the ongoing task slowed down, regardless of memory load. As regards STM performance, digit recall was equally good regardless of the presence of the prospective memory task. Finally, participants were slower to respond in the letter-matching task when the irrelevant letters were Bs (activation of intention effect). These results are relevant to the question of the role of automaticity in the retrieval of intentions. They also point to the importance of determining the nature of the monitoring processes that support performance in different prospective memory tasks.
Effects of Mild Alcohol Intoxication upon Driver's Eye Movements How much alcohol does it take to meaningfully affect your driving performance? While high levels of alcoholic intoxication clearly impair driving performance, what is the effect of consuming an amount of alcohol that many states consider within the legal limit? In this study, sober individuals and mildly intoxicated individuals were shown scenes taken from the perspective of a driver while their gazepoints were recorded. Subjects with blood alcohol levels between .06% and .1% BAC showed meaningful changes in how they scanned scenes when compared with the performance of sober controls. Finally, college-aged subjects reacted to the demonstration of this impairment with surprise and an increased awareness of the seriousness of the problem, suggesting that eyegaze technology not only has relevance to cognitive research but to drunk-driving fatality prevention efforts as well.
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