Trial lecture presenting my neurocognitive research

In late February 2015 I was invited to give a presentation of my research to the Department of biological and medical psychology at the University of Bergen. I emphasized my neurocognitive research, clinical studies and the use of psychophysiological measures in my applied research. The presentation was structured around the published papers, highlighting the findings in the abstracts. Among the topics covered were implicit learning, selective attention, working memory, situation awareness, team-work, consciousness and clinical work.

Lecture on cognitive factors in operative environments

Below is the presentation from the third lecture in the Operational psychology master's course (in Norwegian). The lecture covers dynamic decision environments, mental models, decision-making, naturalistic decision-making, situation awareness, team decision-making, shared mental models, team cognition, team situation awareness, and finally gave examples from my own research.

Introductory lecture to operational psychology master course

In the spring semester of 2014, we started offering a master's course in Operational psychology. I was responsible for the course, but used extensive guest lecturers, where experts in each respective field was asked to cover a topic. The course topics were:

1. Introduction to the field of Human Factors (me)
2. Operative cooperation, leadership and communication (Roar Espevik)
3. Cognitive processes in operative settings (me)
4. Individual differences in operative situations (Paul Bartone)
5. Care of personnel after critical incidents (Jarle Eid)
6. Human error and accident causes (Kathryn Mearns)

Below is my introductory lecture (in Norwegian). The lecture localized the field of Human Factors within the rest of psychology, and discussed it's history, topics, methods, and gave samples from research and application (including an overview of our research group).

Trial lecture on the psychology of risk

In the process of applying for a associate professor position in cognitive psychology, I was asked to deliver a lecture on my own research. Rather than talking about my previous research on the neurocognition of selective attention, I chose to focus the presentation around different research projects I've had on the topic of "risk".

I started out with an example I sometimes use in my lectures to demonstrate the various risks that are relevant to their age group in Norway. I then introduced some classic studies on risk, and some fundamental perspectives. I presented my recent series of Go/NoGo lab experiments intended to model risk perception. I then introduced "situation awareness" as an application of risk in real-word settings, and the related research projects I've run to attempt to approach it in surveys, lab and field experiments. Finally, I discussed some of the consequences of risk, showing how people's behaviour are sometimes changed after considering dangerous situations. Relevant to this, I presented three experiments done in collaboration with Hallgeir Sjåstad, where presenting a threat influenced how security policy was evaluated by a post-Utøya sample.

Trial lecture on "Human factors"

After applying for a position in work and organizational psychology, I was asked to give a trial lecture to the relevant faculty members. The prescribed topic was "Current perspectives in work and organizational psychology". Some of my research interests were in the field of "human factors", and as this topic was not well represented in the present teaching load of the department, my aim was to demonstrate what "human factors" is, and how it relates to other fields of psychology and should be considered a part of work and organizational psychology. I covered the field's history, some general themes, research approaches and applications.

Presentation of field study for applied network (HFC forum)

I was invited to hold a presentation on my research at one of the meeting for Human Factors in Control, a national network for researchers, industry and consultants that are working with human factors. The presentation is fairly similar to the one I held at HFES in 2012, but somewhat updated and with some added details.

Theory of science lectures

During my post-doc years, I lectured in the topic of Theory of science (Norwegian: vitenskapsteori) for the first semester of psychology (spring and fall). This took the form of three two-hour lectures based on the textbook "How to think straight about psychology" by Keith E. Stanovich. In the presentation materials for the lectures, I proposed a mind map that the students were invited to structure their understanding around. Branches specific for the science of psychology were structured to the left, while less topic specific branches were on the right. the students appeared to respond well to the presentation materials.

HFES conference paper and presentation on shared beliefs in emergency center teams

Towards the end of my post-doc period, I presented my field study work at the 56th annual conference of the Human factors and ergonomics society (HFES) in Boston in 2012. The presentation consisted of a 20 minute presentation and a five page conference paper, both posted below.

The work argues that efficient handling of critical situations relies not only on the availability of information, but also how the information is transferred and distributed within the team. In the presentation I lay out some of the challenges to measuring "situation awareness" for team members in realistic settings. I suggest that it may be fruitful to compare the beliefs of the various team members working together and estimate to which extent they match up. I present a rough description of one of my field experiments, where I worked with the emergency preparedness center of an offshore oil company. Five teams ran a realistic training scenario for 2-3 hours, and the scenario was frozen at nine time points where the team members had to answer how confident they were about their information handling and what they knew about the situation. Heart rate variability was measured for all team members throughout the scenario. 

The results show that team members were quite confident, their confidence rose early in the scenario and remained stable throughout the scenario. However, the confidence was not related to what they actually knew about the scenario, which was lower and varied more across time. High frequency variability in heart rate can be taken as an indicator for cognitive adaptability. Results showed this to covary with less complex phases of the scenario. As this work was ongoing at the time of presentation, the oral presentation results are more complete than the results in the paper. Also note that the calculation of both shared knowledge and HRV have changed since this point in the analysis.

Conference paper: A controlled field study of SA in emergency handling teams

Conference presentation:

Presentation of post doc program

After defending my PhD thesis, I worked in a consulting agency, where I advised on the design of critical work environments to reduce the risk of human error, typical in maritime and offshore settings. After some time there, I was offered a post doc research position at the University of Bergen, although in a different department than where I did my PhD. The post doc was funded by the Research Council of Norway, and was intended to provide actionable input to the Norwegian hydrocarbon industry. Thus I had to turn to a more applied research focus than in my previous basic research on neurocognitive mechanisms, but I was able to relate some of my experience as a consultant in the field.

My post doc project included three different venues of research:

1. Cognitive lab experiments modelling mechanisms of risk behaviour and situation awareness
2. Analysing larger data sets to examine how different individual and organizational variables are connected, and developing an inventory for measuring situation awareness
3. A field study of teamwork in emergency response teams, where the team's training exercises were examined to see to which extent the team members had the same situation awareness 

The third project turned out to become the main focus of my post doc years. After one and a half year on the project, I gave a short presentation of the theoretical model and preliminary results to my faculty colleagues at our annual research seminar:

Introductory lecture on language and thought

The second introductory lecture was on language and thought. I tried to hold the two concepts up against each other, to contrast them and discuss whether they had any overlap.



The final 20 minutes of the two-hour lecture I briefly talked about the concept of intelligence and how it can be measured: http://prezi.com/pznxc5ihzxd3/psyk100-intelligens/

Introductory lecture on "memory"

When I began working at the Department for psychosocial science, I was persuaded to give two lectures in cognitive psychology to the first year students. There were between 200 and 300 students at each lecture, and this was their first introduction to the topic.

The first of these lectures was on the topic of memory. I planned the lecture around the Atkinson and Shiffrin model of three memory stores, so I used this as a visual structure for the presentation, and placed all theories and findings in relation to this model.

The presentation (Norwegian only) is included below. Note that the lecture is supposed to run over 2x45 minutes, so if you click through it in 3 minutes it may induce motion sickness.

Lab meeting: Transient activation of speech areas

In December 2012 I was asked to give a 20 minutes presentation of some of my research at our department's research seminar. I was relatively fresh in the field of work and organizational psychology at that time, so I presented a re-analysis of some previous fMRI work. Although I tried to simplify the work and focus on the gist of it, I'm afraid most of my audience had a hard time to following the unfamiliar topic and methodology. Looking back at it now, I think I may also have overused the prezi features somewhat...

The work I presented had just been accepted into Brain and Cognition the same day as my presentation was due, so I make a note of this at the end.