The Role of Applications Courses

The applicability of basic research in psychological science is obvious to those in the field, but too often underappreciated outside of it. In this article, I suggest some reasons for that gap, including confusion between the relevance of psychological science and its actual application, which can lead to hype; the interdisciplinary nature of applied science, which can obscure the credit due to the field; and the considerable difficulty of moving basic research into application, including the potential for resistance to the products we deliver. I suggest that our own students constitute a relatively underutilized audience for demonstrating that psychological science has been critical to applications, and I describe an applied cognitive science course that is intended to make the case to them. A decade ago, a group of psychological scientists convened in Santa Barbara, CA, for a ‘‘summit’’ meeting, with the lofty goal of determining the future of psychological science in the U.S. Much of the discussion focused on how to promote public understanding of what we do; that is, ‘‘the public image of scientific psychology, and the transfer of knowledge from theory to application and practice’’ (Ruksznis, 1998b, p. 14). At the end of deliberation, the group passed a resolution calling on ‘‘government and society to take greater advantage of existing psychological science’’ and on ‘‘psychological scientists to equip themselves and their students and to educate the public to address the issues of importance to society’’ (Ruksznis, 1998b, p. 14). Psychological science has always been pointed toward application (for historical review, see Benjamin & Baker, 2004), and in the years since World War II, it has spun off whole applied fields, most notably human factors and industrial/organizational psychology. No one at the 1998 summit meeting doubted that basic psychological science could be translated for public good. Earlier that year, the APS Observer featured a special report on basic research in psychological science, as a component of the ongoing Human Capital Initiative (Ruksznis, 1998a). The report suggested 11 basic research areas that were ripe for translation. The suggested areas within cognitive science, my own field, included the usual suspects—perception, learning, memory, and attention—as well as some relatively new kids on the block—expertise, decision making, and neuroimaging of the brain. Following George Miller’s (1969) elegant turn of phrase, academic psychologists often talk about giving psychology away, and it seems that we have ever more to give (for a recent compendium, see Zimbardo, 2004). Yet despite the collective commitment of psychological scientists to pursuing research that has societal relevance and despite our firm belief that we are succeeding, there are clear signs that society—including the general public and policy makers—often misses the point. The 1998 summit was called, in part, because scientists perceived a failure to connect public awareness to the utility of basic psychological research. Why has the public generally failed to recognize the importance of basic psychological science for everyday life? For some insights, consider my own experience as I began to teach a course in applied cognitive science, which I take to be a rough conglomeration of cognitive psychology, cognitive modeling, and cognitive neuroscience. I reread the HCI-6 report with care, expecting to assign it to my students. Although I found some gems of promise and prescience, like cochlear implants, statistical decision aids, and neural correlates of memory states, to my surprise (and chagrin—I helped draft it!), I found the report unusable as a teaching vehicle. Too often, the document veered between broad pronouncements (experts know more than the untutored) and naive prognostications (mandatory attention-skills Address correspondence to Roberta L. Klatzky, Department of Psychology, Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA 15213; e-mail: [email protected]. PERSPECTIVES ON PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE 522 Volume 4—Number 5 Copyright r 2009 Association for Psychological Science tasks for airline pilots; beta-blockers routinely administered to emergency medical personnel). Students, I believed, would not find it persuasive. In large part, I did not. Academic psychologists have an ideal avenue for enhancing public recognition of the applicability of psychological science, and it is one that seems to be underexploited: our own psychology students. As a group, they are bright, interested, well educated, and their interests lean heavily toward applying what they know. Although we are well-prepared to teach them basic psychological science, we sadly lapse in teaching how it is applied. Outside of professional training programs, few courses focus on application. I searched online for applied courses in experimental psychology and found them for the most part in human factors and I/O curricula, with human–computer interaction being a relatively sparse newcomer. Here are some excerpted course descriptions from various Web sites that represent the flavor of these offerings: Industrial/Organizational Psychology. A comprehensive survey of psychology applied to the workplace. We hit all the major topics: job analysis, employee selection, performance appraisal, industrial training, job satisfaction, leadership, and work conditions. Advanced Human Factors Psychology. Foundation from which to study interactions between human beings and systems in order to maximize safety, performance and user satisfaction; integration and application of basic research and theory in sensation, perception, cognition, and motor control. Introduction to Human-Computer Interaction. Concentrates on the effectiveness and efficiency of computer technology from the user’s point of view. We look at the complete life cycle of interface development. These courses sound fine to me, but they aim to cover a core set of topics in a specialized field, and they are oriented toward the training of practitioners. Over the past few years, I have attempted to develop a different sort of course dealing with applications of basic psychological science. There is no professional-training agenda; it is meant simply to be a part of the core curriculum. The goals are to heighten students’ appreciation of the pathway from basic research in psychological science to application, and in addition, to expose them to the ruts and potholes along the way. I focus on cognitive science, my own area of expertise, with some daring forays into topics about which I know relatively little. The evolution of this course has made me aware of a number of issues that I believe go beyond questions of course design to expose more general obstacles to giving psychological science away. In the remainder of this article, I will discuss the issues in a general sense and offer some ideas about how an applications-oriented course in cognitive science (or a parallel course in another discipline) could promote public understanding of our science. ISSUE 1: WHAT IS AN APPLICATION OF PSYCHOLOGICAL SCIENCE? One of the obstacles to showing how psychological science is translational, and one that is amply demonstrated in the HCI-6 Basic Research document from 1998, is the lack of what is called in forensics the chain of evidence. Consider the contrast between psychology and other fields. Engineers and computer scientists perform and publish research, file for patents on the ensuing widgets and software, and perhaps spin off companies. Academic psychologists tend to stop at the perform-and-publish stage. For the most part, we produce scientific discoveries that are relevant to application, and we place them in the public domain. Our work is often combined with contributions from other fields. So how do we and the rest of the world know when we’ve been translational? Let’s take a quote from the HCI-6 document that illustrates the problem: ‘‘For example, psychophysically based knowledge about . . . auditory factors . . . allows us to predict which aspects of the sound wave do not need to be sent with great precision and which aspects do’’ (Ruksznis, 1998a, p. 8). The application of interest here is speech compression, a reduction in information content that is necessary for phone or other speech-transmitting networks in order to handle the transmission of the many messages sent at any one time. Was basic perceptual research necessary to enable this application? You bet—there is no way to know what reduced speech content is decodable by humans without experimentation. Toward this end, classical techniques of psychophysics are invaluable. In short, speech compression is an application that would seem to have a clear trail to its roots in psychological science. Yet, even with this trail, I would suggest that most people don’t spontaneously link the application to basic science in our field. Even more unfortunate are two mirror-image problems. One is failure to apply: Much psychological science that could inform application is disregarded, often with significant cost to the public. The other is a perverse aspect of our field’s relevance to everyday problems, which I compare to Gresham’s Law: It is all too easy to develop an product that claims to be scientifically founded, but isn’t. These pseudoapplications, as I call them, obscure those that have a solid scientific basis and undermine scientific psychology’s reputation as a transferable discipline. To illustrate the failure to apply, here is another quote from HCI-6: ‘‘Research on attention in dynamic displays has direct implications for the design of work environments, car dashboards, intersection signaling, and computer displays, to name just a few examples’’ (Ruksznis, 1998a, p. 11). This statement has face validity, and I agree with what it says, but where’s the app? Ten years after HCI-6, where are the workplace designs or intersection signals that can be directly traced to research on the number of dynamically changing events to which we can attend at any one time? In that decade, GPS systems for cars have become commonplace, and cell phones have added visual Volume 4—Number 5 523 Roberta L. Klatzky