School of Psychology

Research Summary

My main research interests are in cognitive experimental psychology, applied psychology, and human factors (HF). One major research area has been to investigate the negative effects of task interruption on performance across a range of tasks, and to explore the efficacy of methods to mitigate these effects. I am also very interested in display design and cognitive engineering; particularly how subtle changes to interfaces can affect the strategies we employ to engage in tasks and how these can be exploited to improve particular elements of performance (e.g. memory for suspended goals and intentions).

Other research areas include:-

Investigating temporal and other aspects of communications on causal judgement
Investigating the costs associated with switching between different tasks
Exploring the nature and measurement of Situation Awareness (SA)
Instructional and training techniques to improve learning and task performance

Selected Publications (2008 onwards)

Morgan, P. L., & Patrick, J. (2010, in press). Designing interfaces that encourage a more effortful cognitive strategy. To appear in the proceedings of the 54^th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, San Francisco, California, USA.

Morgan, P. L., Patrick, J., & Patrick, T. (2010, in press). Increasing information access cost to protect against interruption effects during problem solving. To appear in the proceedings of the 32^nd Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, Portland, Oregon, USA.

Patrick, J., & Morgan, P. L. (2010). Approaches to understanding, analysing and developing situation awareness. Theoretical Issues in Ergonomics Science, 11(1), 41-57. [pdf]

Morgan, P. L., Patrick, J., Waldron, S. M., King, S. L., & Patrick, T. (2009). Improving memory after interruption: Exploiting soft constraints and manipulating information access cost. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Applied, 15(4), 291-306. [pdf]