UC psychologist wins top US award
university-of-canterbury
Mon May 30 2011 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
UC psychologist wins top US award
Monday, 30 May 2011, 4:28 pm
Press Release: University of Canterbury
UC psychologist wins top US award
A University of Canterbury academic has received international recognition from the world’s largest organisation for psychologists.
Associate Professor William “Deak” Helton (Psychology) has been awarded the Earl Alluisi Award for Early Career Achievement by the American Psychological Association (APA) in recognition of his work in the field of human factors psychology.
The annual award is presented to an academic in the first 10 years of his or her post-PhD career who has made a significant contribution to applied experimental and engineering psychology.
Professor Helton, who will receive his award at the 2012 APA Convention, said he felt “especially honoured as the award has rarely been made to someone outside of North America”.
“Having senior colleagues in the field note my contributions to the science of human factors and applied psychology is definitely rewarding.”
One of Professor Helton’s primary research concerns is the study of vigilance, looking at why people cannot maintain a constant level of attention or alertness over time during monitoring or detection work, such as looking for weapons in luggage or monitoring radars.
Known as the vigilance decrement, Professor Helton said a popular theory in neuroscience circles is that the inability to maintain vigilance is due to these tasks being repetitive, monotonous and boring.
Another theory was that vigilance decrement is tied to how objectively hard the detection task is, not its monotonous nature, he said.
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“We are beginning to link this performance decline with objective physiological changes in the brain. I was one of the first people to use real-time brain monitoring to examine human mental fatigue and vigilance in visual detection tasks.”
Professor Helton said testing the two theories “is extremely critical”.
“It can mean the difference between an air-traffic controller detecting a vehicle parked on the runway or not, which in turn means the difference between you, as a passenger, living or not. I have also done innovative work looking at how emotion impacts human performance, and emotion is often a neglected topic in the field.”
Professor Helton is also one of the first researchers to study working dogs from an ergonomic science perspective. His work in this area resulted in the first scientific book on working dogs, Canine Ergonomics: The Science of Working Dogs (2009).
“The idea that ergonomic science could enhance working dogs’ abilities, which are already exceptional in many regards, just like ergonomic science can enhance human abilities at work, was novel. This generated a great deal of interest in the working dog community and agencies deploying working dogs,” he said.
“If my work helps people find and eliminate improvised explosive devices, landmines and unexploded ordinance, that is really all the reward I need.”
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