Some of my research involves understanding how people become engaged, and how engagement can be measured and induced in certain situations. Tom Chatfield gives a great Ted talk about his ideas of engagement in terms of video games and reward systems. He talks about emotional engagement and collective engagement, and touches on how the two can be [...]

Since Flow Theory is one of the primary frameworks that I use in my current research, I figured I should know how to correctly pronounce Mihály Csíkszentmihályi’s name. I’ve heard many different pronunciations in the past, but the video below helped me figure it out along with this very gauche break down: Me-high Chick-sent-me-high Here [...]

I just finished developing an Online version of the NASA-TLX (http://www.nasatlx.com) and thought I would share. The procedure behind the NASA-TLX was developed by the Human Performance Group at the NASA Ames Research Center. The goal of the TLX is to help researchers gather people’s subjective cognitive workload assessments when participating in various tasks. The [...]

A couple semesters ago, I took a skill acquisition class and one of the major assignments was to select and learn a new skill. While we we learning our new skill, we were reading literature on the various theories on how people learn skills from novice up to the expert level. The combination of application [...]

Captology is a very interesting research area in human factors and human-computer interaction. The etymology of captology comes from ‘Computers as persuasive technologies’. The goal of captology is to understand how to use existing and emerging technologies to influence a person’s behaviors and beliefs. Check out the Stanford lab to find out more. From their [...]

Augmented cognition makes for some really cutting edge human factors research. Basically, the point of AugCog is to figure out how to use technology to overcome cognitive limitations. So how does it (will it) work? Well, using a very basic example, you first have to figure out some way of measuring a persons neurological and [...]

The Human Factors and Ergonomics Society is pretty much the place to be if you’re interested in HF or ergonomics. I like to think of HF as the pursuit to make life easier. Check it out, and don’t forget to read more about the technical groups – from the site: “The TGs provide a forum [...]

Apparently people could carry out mental arithmetic problems much better back in 1979. In a recent study, these Standford researchers found people could only correctly answer problems in the easy category, while those in 1979 could perform mental arithmetic in the medium and difficult categories. I think it all went down hill after the calculator [...]