Argus is a radar simulation that containins approaching airships. Each airship varies across seven attributes, such as speed, altitude, distance from ownship, etc. The primary task is to classify the threat of each airship. Argus was developed to support research in measuring and modeling cognitive workload. Argus can be used in single-subject and team modes.

Argus Prime is a series of experiments using the Argus Simulated Task Environment that are focused on determining how humans operate within a dynamic environment. The series of studies include dual-task and interruption conditions while an operator classifies the threat-level of incoming aircraft (see Argus ).

Over the last two decades attempts to quantify decision-making have established that, under a wide range of conditions, people trade-off effectiveness for efficiency in the strategies they adopt. However, as interesting, significant, and influential as this research has been, its scope is limited by three factors; the coarseness of how effort was measured, the confounding of the costs of steps in the decision-making algorithm with the costs of steps in a given task environment, and the static nature of the decision tasks studied. Across a series of experiments, we embed decision-making tasks into dynamic task environments and vary the cost required for various steps. Across studies, small changes in the cost of interactive behavior leads to changes in the strategy adopted for decision-making as well as to differences in how a step in the same strategy is implemented. Work is proceeding to construct a family of ACT-R models, simBorgs, that perform aspects of the DMAP tasks in the same way as humans.

ProtoMatch is a software tool designed for exploratory data analyses on high-density behavioral data. It provides basic protocol analyses and a means of computing the similarity between two or more sequences of temporally ordered data. ProtoMatch is modularized software that integrates both eye gaze and cursor protocols into a unified stream of high-density, sequential, data.

Saccadic selectivity refers to the systematic selection of some visual locations rather than others due to one of three sources: stimulus-driven processes, soft constraints operating through acquired expected utilities, or deliberately adopted goal-driven strategies. In previous research, we manipulated the global configuration of a visual display to study its influence on the initial fixation in a search task. We also manipulated cognitive load. Across three experiments we found a systematic influence of global configuration on saccadic selectivity. In the second experiment we found that performing a secondary task increases the influence of our global configuration on saccadic selectivity. Experiment 3 pushed our paradigm to its limit to reveal intriguing data regarding the time course of the tradeoff between stimulus--driven processes and soft constraints.

Visual search takes place whenever we are looking for something. But when the location of a search target has been encoded on a previous occasion, memory processes can supplement or compete with eye movements during search. The goal of this project is to illuminate the interactions of visual attention and memory by assessing how humans adapt their search strategies to the cost structure of a task environment.