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Wright State University

A Message from the Department Chair

Fall 2017

Human Factors/Industrial-Organizational

Graduate Program Newsletter

Since my last newsletter message, there have been many

accomplishments and changes in the department. Please join me first

in saying farewell to Dr. Dan Weber and Dr. Brian Kruger. Also, please

join me in saying farewell, sort of, to Dr. John Flach. He has officially

retired as of Spring 2017, but we are pleased that he has not left us. He will continue as an emeritus

faculty member, working out of 444 Fawcett Hall. He has joined a company called Mile Two but will

continue to participate in research through WSU.

We have numerous other accomplishments to report also, including the accreditation of our HF/IO

Ph.D. program by HFES. Our faculty continue to travel the world on sabbatical or for other research

and/or conferences. If you have a few minutes, ask John Flach, Valerie Shalin, Pam Tsang, Gary

Burns, or Mike Hennessy about their recent or upcoming travels to Europe and Asia. Although you

might have heard about some recent budget challenges at WSU, the department and our graduate

program continues to be productive. Elsewhere in this issue is a listing of where our graduates are

now—over 60 of them!! We have some very impressive alumni!

Last, please join me in congratulating all of our graduates from May 2016 through July 2017.

Newsletter Editor: Robert MayNewsletter Advisors: Dr. Pam Garverick, Dr. Nathan Bowling

Ph.D. graduates Beyhmer, Kyle, Ph.D.

Douglas, Lisa, Ph.D.

Garrett, James S., Ph.D.

Haggit, Jordan, Ph.D.

Holt, Jerrod, Ph.D.

Jackson, Sarah, Ph.D.

Kegley, John, Ph.D.

Kelly, Darrell, Ph.D.

M.S. graduates

Edman, Christopher, M.S.

Fox, Olivia, M.S.

Gibson, Anthony, M.S.

Glavan, Joeseph, M.S.

Houston, Devin, M.S.

Lemasters, Lucas, M.S.

Wilson, Haley, M.S.

Zhang, Hanshu, M.S.

Khazon, Steve, Ph.D.

Lippa, Katherine, Ph.D.

Martinez, Silas, Ph.D.

Periard, David, Ph.D.

Rizzardo, Caitlan, Ph.D.

Robinson, Eric, Ph.D.

by Dr. Debra Steele-Johnson


Congratulations to...

Andrew Hampton, Dr. Valerie Shalin

Human Factors Prize Recognizing Excellence in

Human Factors/Ergonomics Research 2016

fall 2017

Betsy Fox

Women of MathPsych (WoMP) Travel

and Networking Award 2016

Hanshu Zhang

Best Student Paper from the Human

Performance Modeling Technical Group,

2016 HFES Annual Meeting

Dr. John Flach

Invited in 2016 to be the 2017 Keynote Speaker,

Swedish Cognitive Science Society Conference,

Uppsala, Sweden, Oct. 26-27, 2017


Congratulations to...

fall 2017

Dr. Nathan Bowling Listed in 2017 among the top 2% of most cited authors in

introductory-level industrial and organizational psychology

textbooks. He was one of only 14 to make this list that

received their PhDs since 2000

Dr. Tamera Schneider

Promoted in August of 2017 to Deputy Division Director

for Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences at NSF

Sarah Cicora

2016 President’s Award for Excellence,

Excellence in Human Relations (unclassified staff)

Dr. Joseph Houpt

William K. Estes Early Career Award, Society for

Mathematical Psychology 2016

R. Duncan Luce Outstanding Paper Award,

Journal of Mathematical Psychology 2015


fall 2017

by Dr. Scott Watamaniuk,

Graduate Program Director

As we start the Fall semester, we welcome new graduate students

to our program. Fall is also when all returning graduate students tell us

what they have accomplished during the previous year in the form of an

annual activity report. The faculty then review these reports and based on the information, offer

congratulations, encouragement, and sometimes a bit of tough love. The point of this exercise is to

keep the entire graduate faculty informed of student progress and also to hopefully keep students

focused on the things they need to accomplish to progress through the program at a reasonable

pace. In keeping with the latter purpose, these reports ask the student to identify what they hope to

accomplish in the next academic year in order to provide themselves with tangible and achievable

goals on which to focus.

Something new for this Fall, is that we hope to use one of the brown bag seminars early in the

semester to highlight and update everyone on the achievements of our faculty and alumni. We

hope to have this mini ‘celebration of achievements’ every year. Speaking of achievements, this

year not only marks the 50th anniversary of Wright State University, but also the 25th anniversary

of our graduate program and the 10th anniversary of our undergraduate Behavioral Neuroscience

concentration. There will be some special events sprinkled throughout the year in honor of these

anniversaries so be on the lookout for those. We also plan to continue, throughout the year, to

bring in alumni to present brown bag seminars about their recent work.

Finally, I wanted to remind everyone about the graduate student grants that are offered through the

WSU Graduate Student Assembly (GSA). Every year, the GSA has two opportunities (around mid-

October and mid-March) to apply for its Original Work and Professional Development grants. These

are small grants to help graduate students with their original research (buy material, pay subjects,

etc. - maximum $750) or their professional development (helping defray the costs of attending a

conference, seminar, or workshop - maximum $400). In the past, the GSA has had $5000 to

distribute in each of its two competition rounds per year. There is a separate application form for

each type of grant available at the following address: https//www.wright.edu/graduate-student-

assembly. You must be a member of GSA to submit a grant application but membership is free for

all Wright State Graduate students so there is no reason not to take advantage of this grant

opportunity. Many of our graduate students have benefitted from these awards so I encourage all

students to keep these funding opportunities in mind.

Graduate Program Address


fall 2017

Window into Current Research

The field of trust research affords a productive interplay between theory

and practice. Recently, there has been increased interest in research on

trust driven by practical problems and applications in diverse areas such as

robotics, healthcare, peacekeeping, and education. In order to meet practical demands, the theory on

trust development must bridge conventional gaps between cognition, affect, meta-cognition, individual

and interpersonal psychology, computer science, and economics, et

My collaborators and I are in the process of developing a unified theory of learned trust in

interpersonal and human-machine interactions. This theory is grounded in the general principles of

human cognition and is expressed as a series of cognitive models developed in the Adaptive Control

of Thought – Rational (ACT-R) cognitive architecture. Unified theories are the quintessence of

scientific progress; they constrain the myriad of possible interpretations of empirical data, facilitate

communication among theorists, and motivate new avenues for empirical research. A cognitive

architecture is a single system of cognitive mechanisms that operate together to produce the full

range of human cognition. ACT-R (Anderson 2007) is a theory of human cognition and a cognitive

architecture that is used to develop computational models of various cognitive tasks. Studying trust

from a cognitive architecture perspective allows not only integration of various empirical findings from

the trust literature but also understanding how trust relates to other cognitive mechanisms and

phenomena such as motivation, learning, and strategy choice.

Using computational cognitive models as theory-building tools also affords modalities of testing the

validity of a theory that other ways of theorizing cannot utilize. For example, we routinely employ ACT-

R models to generate a priori predictions. These are predictions generated by a computational model

before a human study is conducted. Typically, a model is developed based on theory, literature, or

prior studies and used to generate predictions for new tasks, new experimental conditions, or new

manipulations. The study design and setup are identical for model simulations and human data

collection, resulting in simulation data that are as rich and fine-grained as the human data. Then,

based on the results of the human study, the model is revised, new predictions are generated, and the

theory development cycle is repeated. Furthermore, having the theory expressed in computational

terms could facilitate its translation into practical applications.

Preliminary validation studies show that our ACT-R models of learned trust exhibit human-like

behavior in games of strategic interaction such as Prisoner’s Dilemma and Chicken. These are mixed-

motive non-zero-sum games that are played repeatedly. The individually optimal and the collectively

optimal solutions may be different. Players can choose to maximize short- or long-term payoffs by

engaging in cooperation or defection and coordinating their choices with each other.

by

Dr. Ion Juvina


fall 2017

These features give these games the strategic dimension that makes them so relevant to real-world

situations. The models are “aware” of the interdependence between the counterparts, can learn to

play different games, and are able to learn to trust other models or humans based on perceived

trustworthiness and trust necessity (see Juvina et al., 2015; Juvina et al., under review, for more

details). Our theory emphasizes the importance of the strategic dimension of trust development, an

aspect that is often overlooked in the trust theory. Strategic interactions can be characterized as

lasting, repeated, cooperative or adversarial, and involving interdependent rational agents balancing

multiple motives, constraints, etc.

The process of developing a unified theory of interpersonal and human-machine trust has revealed

areas in which cognitive architectures are still weak and can benefit from further research and

development efforts. For example, we have realized that a general architectural mechanism is

necessary to handle not only trust learning but a more general kind of learning that allows cognitive

architectures to perform value-based decision making. For instance, the decision to (not) trust

depends on evidence of (un) trustworthiness that is valenced (i.e., positive or negative). This

characteristic must be adequately reflected in mental representations that support trust decisions.

Currently, ACT-R does not have a general learning mechanism for valenced values for declarative

knowledge. When such values are needed (e.g., in instance-based-learning models) they are hand

coded. We have proposed a novel approach to adding primitive evaluative capabilities to a cognitive

architecture and shown that it holds promise to account for a variety of empirical results from the

memory and decision-making literatures (Juvina et al., 2017).

Our future research endeavors will be centered around studying human-machine teaming from a

behavioral-game-theoretic perspective, emphasizing the interdependence between actors engaged in

strategic interaction, balancing mixed motives and short- and long-term costs and benefits. As

machines become more intelligent and autonomous, it will become important and useful to allow them

to assume roles that are currently seen as exclusively human. We would like to study how machines

can develop trust relationships with humans and how they assess the trustworthiness of their human

counterparts from behavioral, linguistic, and physiological input.


Introducing our second yearsJoey completed his Psychology BA from Wittenberg University, in Springfield,

OH. He first became interested in HF during his time working for ShadowBox

LLC, a small research and consulting company in Dayton, Ohio. While at

ShadowBox, he explored how people make decisions under complex,

ambiguous, and shifting conditions (e.g., law enforcement, military, firefighting)

and became interested in the concept of expertise. When he has free time he

enjoys running, hiking, traveling, and anything music.

Why WSU: “I chose Wright State because Dr. Assaf Harel's lab bridged my

interests of cognitive neuroscience and expertise.”

fall 2017

Kevin completed his undergrad at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute. He first

became interested in HF through computer science courses in undergrad;

discovering the importance of proper interface design when looking at how to

design programs and applications. His research interests include learning,

expertise, flow state, and cognitive modeling.

Why WSU: "I chose WSU because of the cognitive modeling community here

and on base, and because my research interests overlap with those of my

advisor."

Joey Borders Hometown:

Springfield, Ohio

Kevin O'Neil Hometown:

Gahanna, Ohio

Morgan Borders Hometown:

Springfield, OhioMorgan went to undergrad at Wittenberg University. She became interested in

HF during her first job after undergrad where she learned about the field of HF

and helped design and test an interface and educational materials. This

piqued her interest in how design influences human behavior. Her current

research interests are the development and regulation of emotions and

attitudes, particularly in regards to women in STEM and team functioning. In

her free time she enjoys running, doing yoga, hiking, baking, traveling, and

reading.

Why WSU: "I chose WSU because there is a wide range of research areas

being explored allowing students to cultivate knowledge in a variety of areas

and providing differing perspectives. Additionally, my research interests were

well-aligned with several faculty at the university."


Introducing our second years

fall 2017

Cheyna finished her undergrad at Auburn University. She became interested

in I-O because of her desire to make real-world improvements in organizations

and in the lives of employees. Her current research interests include careless

responding, occupational health and stress, and counterproductive work

behavior. In her free time she likes to go on hikes with her dog, do yoga, and

catch up on Netflix.

Why WSU: "I chose WSU because of the research opportunities and my

overlapping interests with my advisor, Nathan A. Bowling."

Cheyna Brower Hometown:

Birmingham, Alabama

Tyler Whitlock Hometown:

Canton, Ohio

Tyler did his undergrad at Ohio State University, where he first became

interested in HF psychology because of his work at the Ohio State Driving

Simulation lab. His current research interests are Virtual Reality, Augmented

Reality, and Interface Design. During his free time he enjoys playing video

games, hiking, and cooking.

Why WSU: "I chose Wright State University because I felt that I would have

the freedom and opportunities to be able to pursue many of my research

interests."

Montana received her undergraduate degree from Wright State University.

She chose to pursue I-O because it’s a combination of psychology and

business – her two favorite fields. Her research interests include the study of

high-performing employees, performance appraisals, and selection. In her

spare time, Montana enjoys training or playing with her dogs, hiking, and

working on her house.

Why WSU: “I like the culture and I already knew a lot of the faculty.”

Montana Wooley Hometown: Troy, Ohio

Sarah graduated from Wright State University with a B.S. in Psychology. She

first became interested in the design/engineering aspect of Human Factors

while in the Air Force. However, while working at the Air Force Research

Laboratory, she became more interested in the psychology side of the field.

Why WSU: "I chose to apply to WSU because I heard good things about their

program from prior and current students, and I could continue working on base

if I was accepted to WSU."

Sarah Jessup Hometown:

Greenfield, Indiana


Introducing our second yearsNick received his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St.

Louis. He chose to pursue I-O psychology because he found that his interests

and daily curiosities at work paralleled greatly with the research of an I-O

psychologist. His research interests include learned helplessness, motivation,

resilience, feedback seeking behavior, and positive psychology in the

workplace. In his spare time, Nick enjoys going to the gym, hiking, playing

games with friends, and watching Netflix.

Why WSU: “It has an amazing program that fosters a cooperative

environment which I did not see anywhere else. Additionally, my advisor in the

program matched my preferred methods of learning and my research interests

incredibly well."

fall 2017

Abraham received his undergraduate degrees from the University of Texas and

Lamar University in addition to his Master’s in therapy from Capella University.

He chose to pursue I-O psychology because it was an intersection of his

undergraduate interests of psychology and economics, encapsulating many of

his research interests. His research interests include business automation,

gamification, and motivation. In his free time, Abraham enjoys playing games

with friends, going to escape rooms, and reading.

Why WSU: “I chose Wright State because the cooperative atmosphere

fostered by the students and staff was something that seemed to be genuinely

unique. The inclusion of HF training within the I-O program also worked with

many of my research interests.”

Nick Kovacs Hometown:

Potomac, Maryland

Abraham Haskins

Hometown: Seattle, Washington

Michael Collins Hometown:

Dayton, Ohio

Mike received his undergraduate degree from Wright State University. He

chose to pursue HF because he found it to be a nice intersection between

both the basic and applied research he was familiar with as a result of his

work on base and with Dr. Juvina during his undergraduate work. His

research interests include cognitive modeling, mathematical modeling,

cognitive architectures, trust, decision making, and behavioral game theory. In

his spare time, Mike enjoys spending time with his daughter, reading, and

playing guitar.

Why WSU: "During my undergrad I was impressed with the Professors at

Wright State and culture of the graduate school. I felt that coming to Wright

state would allow me to pursue my research interest and also offer a unique

opportunity to work with Researchers at the Base."


Other Recent Developments

fall 2017

March for Science

Cheyna Brower, Morgan Borders, and Joey

Borders were an integral part of the

organizing committee for the March for

Science in Dayton. Both Carmen Culotta and

Montana Woolley made important

contributions to the committee.

Betsy Fox, August Capiola, Claire Shah, and

Michelle Wang volunteered their time on the

day of the event to help set up and

orchestrate the march. Many others from the

department attended the march to show their

support.

Science, Not Silence!

The March for Science in Dayton was held on Earth Day, 22 April 2017, at the Courthouse Square.

WHIO news estimated 1,200-1,500 people attended the event. The event began with a rally and

speeches in the square, followed by a march through downtown, and ended with science-related

exhibitors.

The March for Science in Dayton was inspired by sweeping and alarming policy changes happening

in government. The March’s mission was intentionally and explicitly non-partisan. The goal was to

speak out and find a place where citizens can stand together and build a better, evidence-based

future for all. The March for Science believes that science is a vital feature of a working democracy,

spurring innovation, critical thinking, increased understanding, and better, healthier lives for all

people. By marching, organizers hoped to encourage people to become more active in and excited

about our scientific community and democracy. As a community, we should strive to hold our

leaders, both in science and in politics, accountable to the highest standards of honesty, fairness and

integrity.

The national March for Science has a

continuing movement that you can join

by going to their website at

https://www.marchforscience.com


Other Recent DevelopmentsISAP

fall 2017

The 19th International Symposium on Aviation Psychology

(ISAP) was held at Wright State in early May. Researchers

and practitioners from industry, government agencies,

research laboratories, and universities from around the world

came to discuss the advancement of aviation psychology

towards a safer and more efficient sky. Several of our

students attended, volunteered their time, and presented

their work.

Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping

Annual Meeting of the Psychonomic Society

Annual Meeting of the Society for Neuroscience

Association for Psychological Science Annual Convention

HFES (Human Factors and Ergonomics Society)

International Conference of the European Association for Aviation Psychology

International Society for Developmental Psychobiology

ISAP (International Symposium on Aviation Psychology)

MPA (Midwestern Psychological Association)

National Science Foundation workshop

RCIO (River Cities Industrial and Organizational)

Society for Neuroscience Annual Meeting

SIOP (Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology)

SPSP (Society for Personality and Social Psychology)

Winter Conference on Current Issues in Developmental Psychobiology

Conferences attended in 2016/2017:


fall 2017

Conference and Workshop Pictures:


Recent Publications

fall 2017


fall 2017


fall 2017

Alumni Spotlight

Dr. Leasher received the 2017 Distinguished Early Career

Contributions for Practice by the Society for Industrial and

Organizational Psychology.

In February she also gave a brown bag presentation to the

department titled "I-O Consulting: Giving Back to the Community".

Dr. Jenna Filipkowski

Dr. Megan Leasher

Dr. Filipkowski started an Executive and Professional Coaching

Certificate Program at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the

The University of Texas at Dallas.

Her goal is to become an Associate Certified Coach (ACC) from the

ICF in March of 2018. Currently the head of research at the Human

Capital Institute, she intends to start her own coaching business on the

side.

A few of our alumni shared their most recent achievements with us.

Their accolades are reproduced below.

Dr. Murphy was named 2017 "entrepreneurship professor of the year"

across all Chicago-area universities by Future Founders, a national

organization devoted to promoting entrepreneurship and

entrepreneurship education.

Additionally, in December 2016 he was selected as one of Chicago

Inno’s "50 on Fire" in the education category for contributions to the

Chicago innovation economy.

Dr. Patrick J. Murphy


fall 2017

Where are our Graduates now? Now that you have read a bit about the recent accomplishments of a few of our alumni, perhaps

you are interested in what the remainder are up to. Below you will find just that: the name of each

graduate, their current position and organization, and what their degree emphasis was (HF or I-O).

To all of our alumni, you should be proud of what you have achieved

and the roles you play in these organizations.


fall 2017

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