Applied Psychology Unit Research Articles

Interview with Jonathan Grudin on “Computer-Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing”

Jonathan GrudinMicrosoft ResearchOne Microsoft WayRedmond, WA 98052United Statesjgrudin@microsoft.comJonathan Grudin is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research in the fields of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) and Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). Grudin is a pioneer of the field of CSCW and one of its most prolific contributors. He was awarded the inaugural CSCW Lasting Impact Award in 2014 on the basis of this work. Prior to working at Microsoft Research, Grudin was a Professor of Information and Computer Science at the University of California, Irvine from 1991 to 1998. His career has also spanned numerous institutions. He worked at Wang Laboratories as a Computer Programmer (1974-1975 and 1983-1986). He was a Visiting Scientist in the Psychology and Artificial Intelligence Laboratories at MIT (1976-1979) and then a NATO Postdoctoral Fellow at the Medical Research Council’s Applied Psychology Unit (now known as the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unit (1982-1983)

The auditory image model and me

As a Ph.D. student in Roy Patterson's group at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, UK, in the early 1990s, I was introduced to computer models of hearing. Much of my Ph.D. was devoted to exploring Roy’s Auditory Image Model, a time-domain model for representing regularities in hearing sensations that we hear. It was built on a gammatone filterbank, a hair-cell model, and strobed temporal integration, and was programmed with a speed that was remarkable for the age. The pictures and movies that it made—and the insights into hearing that it gave—were exciting and inspiring; my resulting enthusiasm for what good models can do has remained with me throughout my scientific career. This talk will describe some of Roy’s contributions to modelling and his influence on the field, as ever-improving computational models are crucial to making progress in understanding how hearing works. [Work supported by the Medical Research Council and the Chief Scientist Office, Scotland.]

World War II and other historical influences on the formation of the Ergonomics Research Society

Little has been written about wartime ergonomics and the role this played in prompting the need for a society dedicated to ergonomics within the UK, namely the formation of the Ergonomics Research Society (ERS) in early 1950. This article aims to fill this gap in our understanding of the history of ergonomics in the UK and provide further details of the types of research undertaken by wartime research groups and committees such as the Institute of Aviation Medicine, Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit and the Flying Personnel Research Committee. In addition, the role of societal developments such as wartime links with the USA, the post-war drive to increase productivity and collaboration with industry and the recommendations of government committees in stimulating the work of the ERS are described in detail. This article also offers some reflection on present-day ergonomics in the UK and how this contrasts with the past. Statement of Relevance: This article will provide practitioners with a historical perspective on the development of ergonomics from its roots in the Second World War. These developments shed light on current trends and challenges within the discipline as a whole.

Patricia Wright [Universidade de Cardiff – País de Gales /Reino Unido

Cientista do comportamento com PhD em Psicologia pela University College London [1966], com interesse na contribuio do design da informao na comunicao com o pblico em geral, quer em organizaes pblicas ou comerciais. At 1968 trabalhou na Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit em Cambridge, quando passou a ser coordenadora da School of Psychology na Universidade de Cardiff, onde a maior parte de suas pesquisas est voltada para informao na rea de sade e para documentos multimdia. Possui diversas publicaes, sendo membro de vrias revistas cientficas e de sociedades como: The British Psychological Society, The Institute of Scientific and Technical Communicators (GB) e membro honorrio da Society for Technical Communication (EUA) e da Sociedade Brasileira de Design da Informao. Em 2005 recebeu o prmio Goldsmith Award for Distinguished Contributions to Engineering Communication pelo Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). [ Download ]

Wellcome witnesses: The Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit.

A Witness Seminar brings together individuals involved in a significant event in the treatment of a medical condition to describe its background and to discuss, debate, or even to disagree with their peers' recollections. A brief description is given of the Witness Seminar, held in June 2001 by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, which considered the history of Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit (ABU) in Cambridge, United Kingdom. The APU was created in 1944 and produced more than 3,000 papers before it was renamed the Cognition and Brain Sciences Unite (CBU) in 1998. Photographs of key figures and purpose-built apparatus illustrate some of its early work as recorded in the published transcript of the meeting.

Remember the Strong Program?

Before arriving at the Science Studies Unit in 1967 I took a degree in experimental psychology at Cambridge. Richard Gregory and Donald Broadbent were just two of the fine group of experimentalists Cambridge housed at that time. My exposure to the Psychological Laboratory and the Applied Psychology Unit was intellectually exciting, and I acquired a great respect for the discipline. It provided me with an orientation I have never lost. I want to make use of that orientation now, as a way of introducing a discussion of the sociology of knowledge and, in particular, of the so-called strong program.1 This may seem an odd procedure because it straddles disciplinary boundaries, but I hope I can show that such worries are misplaced.

Therapist session intentions in cognitive–behavioral and psychodynamic–interpersonal psychotherapy.

William B. Stiles Miami University Mike Startup University of Wales, Bangor Gillian E. Hardy, Michael Barkharn, Shirley Reynolds Anne Rees, and David A. Shapiro University of East Anglia University of Leeds Theories of psychotherapy are implemented by therapists' intentional actions within sessions. This study examined the structure and construct validity of the Therapist Session Intentions (TSI) form. Ten therapists rated their therapeutic intentions following each of 2,305 therapy sessions of cognitive-behavioral or psychodynamic-interpersonal therapy in the Second Sheffield Psychotherapy Project. Seven conceptually coherent clusters of intentions, or therapeutic foci, were identified: treatment context, session structure, affect, obstacles, encouraging change, behavior, and cognition-insight. Contrasting patterns of therapeutic focus across treatments and changes in focus across sessions within treatments appeared conceptually coherent. Correlations across a subsample of sessions confirmed correspon- dences of the TSI foci with dimensions found previously in observers' ratings. The therapist is responsible for translating psychotherapy theory into practice by a series of intentional actions. This article reports a study of therapists' intentions in sessions of two theoretically different psychotherapies--one cognitive- behavioral (CB) and one psychodynamic-interpersonal (PI)--as implemented in the Second Sheffield Psychother- apy Project (Shapiro, Barkham, Hardy, & Morrison, 1990; Shapiro et al., 1994). Our goal was to assess the structure and construct validity of a postsession self-report instrument and to identify subscales for use in future studies. We examined how therapists' intentions clustered together within sessions of each treatment and how they changed systematically across sessions. We also compared thera- pists' reported intentions in sessions with ratings of their behaviors by raters who had listened to a subsample of the session tape recordings to assess the degree of convergence of descriptions of sessions' contents from these different perspectives. William B. Stiles, Department of Psychology, Miami Univer- sity, Oxford, Ohio; Mike Startup, School of Psychology, Univer- sity of Wales, Bangor, Wales; Gillian E. Hardy, Michael Barkham, Anne Rees, and David A. Shapiro, Psychological Therapies Re- search Centre, University of Leeds, England; Shirley Reynolds, Health Policy and Practice Unit, University of East Anglia, Nor- wich, England. This article was written in part while William B. Stiles was at the MRC/ESRC Social and Applied Psychology Unit, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, England, supported in part by Senior Interna- tional Fellowship 1 F06 TW01808-01 from the Fogarty Interna- tional Center of the National Institutes of Health. We thank Jane Hall and Mary Lou Hughes for administration of the clinic. Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to William B. Stiles, Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, Ohio 45056. Electronic mail may be sent via Internet to wbstiles @miamiu.muohio.edu. 402 As reported elsewhere (Shapiro et al., 1994, 1995), most clients in all cells of the Sheffield project design improved substantially across treatment, suggesting that both CB and PI treatments were very effective. There were no substantial mean differences in outcomes between clients who received CB versus PI treatment at termination or 3-month follow- up. Thus, the intentions we studied took place, in general, in the context of equivalently successful treatments. The Concept of Therapist Intention According to Hill and O'Grady (1985), Intentions can be defined as a therapist's rationale for select- ing a specific behavior, response mode, technique, or inter- vention to use with a client at any given moment within the session. Intentions represent what the therapist wants to ac- complish through his or her behavior within the session. An intention is the cognitive component that mediates the choice of intervention. (p. 3) Defined in this way, therapist intentions are epistemologi- cally private, and our most direct access to them is by asking therapists to reveal their thoughts. This sense of intention should be distinguished from sense of intent used in re- sponse mode coding (e.g., Could you come closer? has an interrogative form but a directive intent), which refers to the on-record meaning of utterances (Stiles, 1987). We use the former, private sense of intention in this article. As Hill and O'Grady (1985) pointed out, a systematic classification of intentions, thus conceived, may be useful for clarifying therapists' internal processes in teaching, clinical supervi- sion and practice, and research. Based on an initial list developed by Elliott and Feinstein (1978), a literature search, and a series of formal and infor- mal clinical studies, Hill and O'Grady (1985) constructed a

Book Review. Adult Information Processing: Limits on Loss

International Journal of Geriatric PsychiatryVolume 11, Issue 3 p. 273-273 Book Review Book Review. Adult Information Processing: Limits on Loss Ian Robertson, Ian Robertson MRC Applied Psychology Unit, CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author Ian Robertson, Ian Robertson MRC Applied Psychology Unit, CambridgeSearch for more papers by this author First published: March 1996 https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1099-1166(199603)11:3<273::AID-GPS340>3.0.CO;2-2AboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat No abstract is available for this article. Volume11, Issue3March 1996Pages 273-273 RelatedInformation

Behavioural demands direct attentional strategies: The 1993 Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive Science.

The Banff Annual Seminar in Cognitive Science (BASICS) was founded in 1982 and has met each spring since then in Banff, Alberta, Canada. This past May thus marks the 12th year of this conference where now more than 70 hour - long talks have been presented. BASICS was originated to provide an informal atmosphere for the in - depth discussion of a wide variety of research topics within the broadly defined domain of cognitive science. Topics of discussion have ranged from both animal and human basic perceptual processes throughout the information - processing spectrum to include attention, memory, reading and even the neural substrates of these processes. A significant number of talks over the years has delivered the message that sensory perception and cognition need to be studied together, as each has much to contribute to an understanding of the other. The structure of the BASICS conference provides each speaker with 90 minutes to present his or her research which includes an extensive question - and - answer period. This format has been received enthusiastically by speakers and audience alike and creates a workshop - type atmosphere, rather than one of a typical conference. Although the talks this year ranged in scope, as they have in previous years, visual attention was clearly the dominant topic with speakers addressing the strategic role of attention in spatial and temporal search of briefly presented visual displays, vocabulary acquisition, the estimation of event frequency, and as revealed by the study of specific neuropsychological disorders. The purpose of the present paper is to summarize and find commonalties among the individual abstracts which follow.The first speaker, Norman Brown (University of Alberta) began his talk with the premise that a valid model of the estimation process is essential to an understanding of the process of encoding and representing event frequency. Furthermore, Brown contended that one has only to look to research conducted on memory to realize that accurate assessment of event frequency depends in large part on the nature of the task and that humans are capable of using a number of strategies, the choice of which will determine their degree of success. To examine this contention, this researcher presented lists of pairs of words comprised of category labels and exemplars and varied whether each category label was paired with the same or a different exemplar. In two experiments which required estimation and reaction time, respectively, subjects had to estimate how frequently each label in the list had appeared. Brown reported that the success of this task was influenced heavily by the strategy chosen and that such strategic choice accounted for similar outcomes previously unexplained by prior researchers.Visual AttentionIn the second talk, John Duncan (MRC - Applied Psychology Unit) continued the theme as to how psychological processes are selected according to the current demands of behaviour. Duncan employs both behavioural and neurophysiological techniques to study visual attention and for years has advocated that such attention is directed at the level of whole objects and that attentional systems coordinate their actions to facilitate object processing. To obtain physiological support for this latter assertion, Duncan and his colleagues recorded from single units in Macaque monkeys and in addition to finding facilitation of cells selectively responsive to the target, also found suppression of responding to nontarget stimuli prior to a saccade to a target in a visual search paradigm. Yet in describing other studies, Duncan revealed that PET measurements from regions of visual cortex involved in object discrimination tasks show that whole object representation is not revealed at this level. Finally, Duncan also reported on collaborations with other colleagues showing that the interference produced by the act of selecting an object for report lasts on the order of 10 times that previously believed to exist for visual displays requiring serial search. …

Training For Older Managers

Peter Warr, Director of the MRC/ESRC Social and Applied Psychology Unit and a member of the ESRC Centre for Economic Performance, draws upon the Labour Force Survey and a study of members of the Institute of Management to provide detailed information about the incidence and duration of training undertaken by managers at different ages. In the context of projected ageing of the working population, he makes recommendations at three levels: encouraging adaptability through organisational norms, developing and applying training procedures which are effective for older learners, and the creation of national training targets for managers.

Effective multidisciplinary teamwork in primary health care

The nature and development of teamwork in primary health care is discussed and some barriers to effective teamwork identified. Theories of team effectiveness are outlined and methods of applying these to primary health care teams are explored. The 'constituency approach' and the theory of team innovation are examined in more detail. Team-building interventions are described as one way of improving team effectiveness but their limitations are also acknowledged. The Health Education Authority primary health care team workshops are used as an example of a team-building intervention. Research at the MRC/ESRC Social and Applied Psychology Unit, Sheffield University, is described. This is evaluating the outcomes of the primary health care team workshops in terms of team effectiveness. The research will measure viability (the extent to which the team sufficiently sustains good relationships to continue working together) and team performance (achievement of desired outcomes) pre and post workshop. Team effectiveness will be measured through team self-assessment, patient satisfaction and family health service authority designated targets for health promotion. The overall aim is to develop a model of team effectiveness for primary health care teams, which can then be used to diagnose and guide teams in their work.

Where did you park your car? Analysis of a naturalistic long-term recency effect

Abstract Three experiments studied the long-term retention of parking locations. In Experiment 1, members of the Applied Psychology Unit (MU) attempted to recall where they had parked during the morning and afternoon of each of the previous 12 working days. A marked recency effect was observed. In Experiment 2, members of the APU Subject Panel were invited for a single test session, and asked where they had parked after a delay of 2 hours, 1 week or 1 month. Recall was excellent and did not differ as a function of delay, allowing a simple trace decay interpretation to be ruled out. A third experiment invited subjects to attend on two occasions separated by a 2-week interval. The subjects were then required to recall their parking locations some 4 weeks after either their first visit or their second visit. Performance in both groups was inferior to that observed in Experiment 2, and declined over time. A temporal discrimination model, based on laboratory studies of both long-term and short-term recency in free recall, offers a plausible explanation of our results.

The Two-plus-One Model: A dialogue

W.D. Can we start the interview by my asking you to describe the nature of the two-plus-one model that was developed in Sheffield?M.B. The model we have developed here at SAPU (Social and Applied Psychology Unit) arose from our wish to address two issues: one academic and one practitioner- oriented. Perhaps it is more useful to focus on the latter because that has more direct relevance to practitioners in the field. What we were concerned about was how to deliver a high-impact but low-cost treatment to clients. We looked at the research literature to try and identify the most effective components in devising a model of therapy. On various criteria derived from the literature, we developed the two-plus-one model which comprises two sessions of therapy one week apart followed by a third session three months later. The rationale for the model stems from our knowing that there is a high impact on clients early in therapy and that subsequently there are diminishing returns. The longer one sees a client, effectively, the less improvement one is getting; one is getting into “fine tuning” and what we wanted was a high-impact treatment in order to reach as many people as possible as quickly as possible in order to reduce waiting lists. In other words, to devise a delivery system in which people who wanted treatment could be seen as quickly as possible via an effective treatment mode! which would either act as a “holding environment” until more long-term treatment became available, or was sufficient as a “treatment episode” in itself to address their immediate problems.

Lexical Representation and Process

How do humans understand and produce language? Lexical Representation and is the first collection to cover the full range of lexical representations and their role in language processing. The 18 contributions focus on psychological models of lexical processing, the nature of the input, lexical structure and process, and parsing and interpretation. Lexical Representation and Process provides a coherent and well documented frame of reference for a field of study that is becoming a central to both linguistics and psycholinguistics. It includes a wide variety of approaches from the radical alternative of new connectionist models, through new developments in traditional symbolic approaches, to the reemphasis on linguistic concepts as a crucial input to psycholinguistic models. The contributors are William Marslen Wilson, Ken Forster, Mark Seidenberg, Gary Dell, Dennis Matt, Jeff Elman, Keith Rayner, David Balota, Derek Besner, James Johnston, Uli Frauenfelder, Aditi Lahiri, Anne Cutler, Leslie Henderson, Jorge Hankamer, Rob Schreuder, Ino Flores D'Arcais, Lyn Frazier, Lorraine Tyler, Mark Steedman, Mike Tanenhaus, and Greg Carlson. William Marslen Wilson is a Senior Scientist at the Medical Research Council Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, England. A Bradford Book

Auditory warning sounds in the work environment

One of the most common auditory warnings is the ambulance 'siren'. It cuts through traffic noise and commands one's attention, but it does so by sheer brute force. This 'better safe than sorry' approach to auditory warnings occurs in most environments where sounds are used to signal danger or potential danger. Flooding the environment with sound is certain to attract attention; however it also causes startled reactions and prevents communications at a crucial point in time. In collaboration with several companies and government departments, the MRC Applied Psychology Unit performed a series of auditory warning studies. The main conclusions of the research were that the number of immediate-action warning sounds should not exceed about six, and that each sound should have a distinct melody and temporal pattern. The experiments also showed that it is possible to predict the optimum sound level for a warning sound in most noise environments. Subsequently, a set of guidelines for the production of ergonomic auditory warnings was developed. The guidelines have been used to analyse the environments in both fixed-wing and rotary-wing aircraft, and to design prototype warning systems for environments as diverse as helicopters, operating theatres and the railways.

Utilization Behavior and Frontal Lobe Lesions

Utilization behavior was investigated in an adult with an acute behavioral disturbance, memory deficits, and a localized inferior medial bifrontal lesion at the Psychology Department, National Hospital, Queen Square, London; the MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge; and Department of Neurology, Atkinson Morley's Hospital, Wimbledon; and St. Andrews Hospital, Northampton, UK.

Reading with One Hemisphere

The reading performance of two right-handed teenage girls who had undergone hemispherectomy for intractable epilepsy was examined at the MRC Applied Psychology Unit, Cambridge, the Department of Developmental Pediatrics, Institute of Child Health and Department of Psychological Medicine, Hospital for Sick Children, and the Neurosurgical Unit, Maudsley Hospital, London.

Burgeoning issues in ergonomics, 1975–1980

Ivan came to ergonomics via the route of engineering and psychology, the first practically based in the Royal Engineers and industry and the second founded upon academic qualifications in psychology. He is at present the Assistant Director of the Medical Research Council's Applied Psychology Unit, which has been the inspiration for so much work in that area of ergonomics, and through the laboratories of which many have passed to spread the word world wide. While there, as well as publishing a plethora of research papers he has acted as consultant to many of the U.K.'s national service industries, playing a not inconsiderable part in the development of human factors within British Telecom and the British Post Office. The combination of engineering and psychology gives him a unique insight into his present chief interest road traffic accidents. Ivan Brown following his tenure in the chair of the society, was elected as the first President of the Ergonomics Society when in 1982, after more than 25 years of e...

Making decisions under the influence of memory.

John FoxUniversity of Sheffield, Sheffield, EnglandTheories of decision making are reviewed, particularly those that shed light onclinical decision making. Two approaches are examined in detail, traditionalprescriptive theories (derived from probability theory) and theories based onnonprobabilistic inference processes with a supportive memory mechanism. Anexperiment using a laboratory analogue of clinical diagnosis supplied data aboutseveral aspects of the decision process including information seeking and theterminal decision. A second task interleaved with the diagnostic task was de-signed to provide some insight into the subjects' organization of the diagnostictask material in memory using the proposition confirmation/disconnrmationmethod. Systematic effects of task structure on the availability of knowledgeabout the task were obtained. In two computer simulations the traditionalprescriptive approach to decision making gave a moderately good account ofthe behavior observed in the diagnostic task, but the cognitive theory based onnonprobabilistic inference rules interacting with simple recall processes gaveequal or better quantitative predictions. It is concluded that the nonprobabil-istic approach holds considerable promise for the description of complex deci-sion processes.From an information-processing standpoint,human decision making depends on the inter-action of two main cognitive components: thevarious logical and inferential processes thatcontribute to the final decision and, at leastconceptually distinct, the processes that makethe knowledge or data available that are re-quired for the decision task at hand. Untilrecently, however, decision theorists havebeen more preoccupied with the mathematicaldescription of human decision behavior thanwith a general cognitive account of its processes(see, e.g., Slovic, Fischoff, & Lichtenstein,1977). The tide has recently begun to turn withwork like that on heuristics by Tversky andKahneman (1974), but we have not yet reachedthe point where decision processes can beMany thanks to Richard M. Young for his criticalreading of an early draft of this article, and particularthanks to Vicki Bruce, whose careful and insightfulcomments contributed so much to the final manuscript.Requests for reprints should be sent to John Fox,Medical Research Council, Social and Applied Psy-chology Unit, University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN,England.described in any detail, certainly not decisionsof natural or everyday complexity.This study looks at a more naturalistic de-cision task than is usual and examines somealternative theoretical frameworks for charac-terizing the decision process. The contrast thatemerges is that between the decision theoristswho have tried to develop algebraic and sta-tistical models that are largely fre of performa-tive elements and the thrust elsewhere incognitive psychology, which has been towardmore complete accounts. The decision theoristshave, notably, failed to suggest what sorts ofinference or problem-solving processes de-cision makers typically engage in or howknowledge influences and interacts with thoseprocesses.For illustration we focus on a task modeledon clinical decision making, a field in which theimportance of knowledge is particularly promi-nent. Several possible theoretical accounts ofclinical decision behavior are briefly reviewed,and a decision study is described, which isdesigned to shed light on some of these pro-posals. Finally, two computer simulations of

Factor analysis of analogue scales measuring subjective feelings before and after sleep

A series of 18 visual analogue scales was used to report the subjective feelings of 38 healthy subjects on 732 occasions during experiments concerned with the quality of sleep. Factor analysis of scores from these scales, both for all subjects combined and within each of four subjects separately, yielded two factors consistently -- 'alertness' and 'tranquillity'. Scores derived from the first factor indicated that, in the laboratory setting levels of immediately after waking in the morning were reduced, in relation to those before falling asleep on the previous night.