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 ).

Few tasks are so new as to require the invention of strategies that have never been used by the task performer. Hence, in many situations, settling on a strategy or set of strategies for performing a task is not so much a matter of learning new strategies as it is learning which strategy, out of a set of already acquired strategies, is best adapted to the current environment. Blocks World is a simple task that has been used to study the tradeoff bnetween interaction-intensive and memory-intensive strategies.

CASS (the Cognitive Affective State System) aims at developing a model of the mutual effects of affect on cognition and of cognition on affect. In particular we work towards a deep and fundamental integration of emotion with low-level features of the human cognitive architecture.

CTK is a DTO sponsored project that seeks to support interface design for advanced visualization and interaction techniques. We achieve this using the VIA architecture as a testbed for software applications, performing detailed user analysis (including ProtoMatch eye-data analysis), visual and semantic saliency analyses (Visual Saliency Maps, Measures of Semantic Distance, Information Foraging), developing high-fidelity cognitive models for robust and exhaustive interface testing (simBorgs), and creating methods for assessing dynamic changes in cognitive workload (Cognitive Metrics Profiling).

The goal of MultiWorld is to further integrate cognitive models with the real world. Traditionally, psychologists studying task switching have studied simple laboratory tasks in isolation. This approach has yielded decades of data, but little relevance to the sorts of tasks humans perform routinely. How are we able to perform multiple, complex tasks simultaneously? How do we decide to switch between two tasks? What is the mechanism enabling task switching? MultiWorld seeks to answer these questions by providing a framework for studying multitasking in complex environments. By running tasks and cognitive models on seperate computers, MultiWorld ensures that the dividing line between the two is made explicit. Thus the model sees only what its human counterpart sees.

The ObViS (pronounced like obvious) research project involves the development and validation of measures of visual similarity. We predict that when searching for a particular target object, the similarity of low-level visual features of any given object to the features of the target object will be a better predictor of visual attention than the saliency of the object.

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.

The CogWorks Visualization-Interaction Architecture is a flexible software system designed to facilitate R&D for advanced, dynamic, highly visual interfaces such as those produced by University of Maryland (UMd) and by RPI’s RAIR Lab. Although our configuration uses one PC and one Mac, VIA is platform independent. As all communication between computers occurs over TCP/IP, the key component of VIA, the handler (see Figure) can be written for any platform (Unix, Windows XP, Mac OS 10, etc) and in any language. VIA release 0.1 was used in Sept 2005 with two visualization tools developed by UMd – TreePlus and GraphPlus. The current C# handler can interact with any program that uses the standard C# GUI library (WinForm) and that is written using standard object-oriented design techniques. In the near future we expect to develop handlers for Piccolo™, LispWorks™, and possibly, Java™.