Michael Coovert

• PhD
• Professor (Full) at University of South Florida

Objective: To examine the utility of equal-variance signal detection theory (EVSDT) for evaluating and understanding human detection of phishing and spear-phishing e-mail scams. Background: Although the majority of cybersecurity breaches are due to erroneous responses to deceptive phishing e-mails, it is unclear how best to quantify performance...

The persistently changing landscape of cyberspace and cybersecurity has led to a call for organizations’ increased attention toward securing information and systems. Rapid change in the cyber environment puts it on a scale unlike any other performance environment typically of interest to industrial and organizational (I-O) psychologists and related...

Trust plays a central role in the effectiveness of work groups and teams. This is the case for both face-to-face and virtual teams. Yet little is known about the development of trust in virtual teams. We examined cognitive and affective trust and their relationship to team effectiveness as reflected through satisfaction with one’s team and task per...

Problem. Teams or groups of individuals working together to achieve a shared goal, make up today’s world of work. Although the literature is rife with issues concerning teams, there is no coherent structure to guide researchers wishing to gain a deeper understanding into those factors leading to positive team outcomes. Question. This is due in part...

Serious games are an attractive tool for education and training, but their utility is even broader. We argue serious games provide a unique opportunity for research as well, particularly in areas where multiple players (groups or teams) are involved. In our paper we provide background in several substantive areas. First, we outline major constructs...

Objective Information technology has rapidly changed work in the United States in the 21st century. Healthcare, however, is one industry that has lagged behind in IT investment for a variety of reasons. Recent federal initiatives to encourage IT adoption in the healthcare industry provide an ideal context to study factors that influence technology...

Today's medical students are digital natives who, for their entire life, have been surrounded by digital technology. Our research focuses on a tablet computer's usability in medical education, and the subsequent transfer from the classroom to the work environment. For a period of three years, all incoming pediatric residents at a large southeastern...

Background: Medical residents receive both medical education and clinical skills training. New technologies and pedagogies are being developed to address each of these phases. Our research focuses on the efficacy of an iPad(®) (Apple, Cupertino, CA) for clinical skills training. Materials and methods: For a period of 3 years, the University of S...

This report examines effects of a coparenting intervention designed for and delivered to expectant unmarried African American mothers and fathers on observed interaction dynamics known to predict relationship adjustment. Twenty families took part in the six-session "Figuring It Out for the Child" (FIOC) dyadic intervention offered in a faith-based...

The Internet enables employees to be more productive than ever before, but it also allows employees a new way to escape from work-cyberloafing. In our investigation, we test the validity of the Theory of Planned Behavior as a model of cyberloafing. In Study I, the goal is to provide an initial test of the theory. In Study 2, we cross-validate the r...

Our work evaluates a mobile robot’s ability to communicate intended movements to humans via projection of visual arrows and a simplified map. Humans utilize a variety of techniques to signal intended movement in a co-occupied space. We evaluated an augmented reality projection provided by the robot. The projection is on the floor and consists of ar...

This paper presents a novel exploration on how to enable a robot to express its intention so that the humans and robot can form a synergic relationship. A systematic design approach is proposed to obtain a set of possible intentions for a given robot from three levels of intentions. A visual intention expression system approach is developed to visu...

Our interest is in increasing the quality of medical education and training. Developments in hardware and software (e.g., Apps) have the potential to enhance medical education and training through the use of simulations, animations, immediate communication of results, and so forth. It is essential, however, that changes to curriculum be data driven...

Effective human–robot team configurations and exchanges are needed to ensure optimal task performance for human–robot teams. The exchanges between robots and human operators are mediated through an interface and this interaction has a direct impact on the team configuration associated with a particular task. Building upon the traditional methodolog...

Many studies have investigated the effect of vibrotactile cues on task performance, but a wide range of cue and task types have made findings difficult to interpret without a quantitative synthesis. This report addresses that need by reviewing the effectiveness of vibrotactile cues in a meta-analysis of 45 studies. When added to a baseline task or...

Working with artificial agents is a challenging endeavor, often imposing high levels of workload on human operators who work within these socio-technical systems. We seek to understand these workload demands through examining the literature in major content areas of human–robot interaction. As research on HRI continues to explore a host of issues w...

Work in the area of robots and human-robot interaction is exploding. This report reviews part of the literature and provides recommendations for future research. Three sections within the report outline topics of special interest: workload, autonomy, and visual displays. Further information on these sections can be found in an online database.

The current study reviews the relationship between manipulations of teleoperator workload and task outcomes, using multiple resource theory as the underlying framework. Results indicated that controlling more than two platforms is detrimental to many performance indices (reaction time, error rate), but overall productivity improves. For studies tha...

The effectiveness and reliability of automation aids are critical topics in the area of human-robot interaction (HRI). As more tasks are subsumed by robots and autonomous systems, it is important to examine the relationships between these entities and their human operators. Research to date has covered various manipulations of autonomy, but this br...

Robots are an ever present part of the workplace. Effective interaction strategies and interfaces are needed to ensure optimal human-robot interaction. Building upon job and cognitive work analysis as traditional methodologies, Petri nets are introduced as a modeling tool for humanrobot interaction. Basic components of the nets are described and ut...

Many studies have investigated the impact of vibrotactile cues on task performance, but the wide range of cue and task types have made findings difficult to interpret without a quantitative synthesis. We provide a systematic review of studies on vibrotactile cue effectiveness with regard to task performance, organized by types of comparisons and cu...

The literature is replete with studies that investigated the effectiveness of vibrotactile displays; however, individual studies in this area often yield discrepant findings that are difficult to synthesize. In this paper, we provide an overview of a comprehensive review of the literature and meta-analyses that organized studies to enable compariso...

This article reviews the link between technology and health. It begins with a brief discussion of workplace health issues brought about through technologically induced strains such as musculoskeletal disorders, carpal tunnel, and psychological stress. It covers recent advances in keyboard design along with other novel approaches to limiting the ass...

A surge of interest exists in multimodal research and interfaces. This is due, at least in part, to an exponential increase in the amount and type of information that can be presented to a user. When a great deal of information is presented via a single sensory modality, it can exceed the operator's capacity to manage the information efficiently, g...

Effective leadership requires relationship skills such as – problem solving conflict management, motivation, communication, and listening [Yukl, G. A. (1998). Leadership in organizations. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Prentice Hall]. Arguably, nothing is more important to a leader than the skills involved in communicating one’s intent to followers, for i...

Understanding the complexities of performance in the world of work is central for advancing science and practice. Pulling from Stagl et al.'s chapter and integrating it with the work of others and our own, we develop and propose a multi-level conceptual model depicting the influences of “distributedness” on system decision making and performance. T...

The purpose of this report is to describe the development of a framework to enable classification, evaluation, and comparison of multimodal display research, based on task demands, display characteristics, research design, and individual differences. In this report, we describe the process by which a bibliographic database was developed and organiz...

As we celebrate the 50th anniversary of HFES, this panel discussion presents the emerging field of human-robot interaction as a critical research area in human factors for the next 50 years. Robots in the workplace are poised to change our lives over the next 50 years much as computers have the past 5 decades. This panel gathers four experts with d...

There is an extensive literature on tactile interfaces and their overall importance to human-computer interaction is increasing. In this presentation we critically examine the psychological, computer science, engineering, and human factors literatures for tactile devices. Two major classes of principles emerge: those taken directly from authors' pu...

In a meta-analysis of 43 studies, we examined the effects of multimodal feedback on user performance, comparing visual-auditory and visual-tactile feedback to visual feedback alone. Results indicate that adding an additional modality to visual feedback improves performance overall. Both visual-auditory feedback and visual-tactile feedback provided...

Information display systems have become increasingly complex and more difficult for human cognition to process effectively. Based upon Wicken's Multiple Resource Theory (MRT), information delivered using multiple modalities (i.e., visual and tactile) could be more effective than communicating the same information through a single modality. The purp...

Recording and analyzing real-time interactions in clinical settings is important for basic and applied research in psychology and other disciplines. Investigators frequently have used simple audiotaping procedures to record these encounters (e.g., Roter, Geller, Bernhardt, Larson, & Doksum, 1999), but videorecording is increasingly viewed as more r...

This article explores human-robot interaction during a 16-hr, high-fidelity urban search and rescue disaster response drill with teleoperated robots. This article examines operator situation awareness and technical search team interaction using communication analysis. It analyzes situation awareness, team communication, and the interaction of these...

This paper describes a study examining the effects of fatigue on team decision-making performance in a command and control context. Ten three-person teams participated in an investigation of sleep deprivation on physiological state, cognitive function, and simulation-based performance. Teams participated in the study from 6:30 pm through 10:30 am t...

Classification problems affect all organizations. Important decisions affecting an organization's effectiveness include predicting the success of job applicants and the matching and assignment of individuals from a pool of applicants to available positions. In these situations, linear mathematical models are employed to optimize the allocation of a...

To demonstrate an integrative methodology to explore psychological constructs, we used multiple methods in the examination of alcohol expectancies-a psychological construct that is generally measured using survey methodology. We then used the methodology in order to assess the relationship of alcohol expectancy dimensions to drinking-related outcom...

Communication between patients and physicians likely mediates traditional patient and physician predispositions in determining patient outcomes, including perceptions and decision making. However, the extent to which a mediating effect occurs is unclear. The purpose of this essay is to outline the need for conceptualizing more holistic models of co...

This study investigated the impact of computer-mediated communication on teamwork by examining 40 4-person teams working in either face-to-face or computer conferencing environments. Results were consistent with the belief that computer-mediated teams have trouble maintaining mutual knowledge. Compared with their face-to-face counterparts, computer...

This research focuses on a modeling approach and set of mathematical tools that were derived from research on intelligence systems, namely fuzzy system modeling. This study systematically evaluates these tools as an approach for modeling human decision making, contrasting the approach with more traditional methods based on regression. The research...

Effective training evaluation presents many challenges to the researcher and practitioner. We introduce rough sets theory and analysis as an analytic tool that can be employed to evaluate training systems effectively. The technique is especially helpful if any of the following situations exist in evaluating the training context: Data are discrete,...

Recent theoretical approaches to the etiology of eating disorders and body image disturbances have begun to focus on multifactorial models. In the current study, the Tripartite Influence model was examined in a large sample of college females (ages 18-22). This model proposes that three primary core sources of influence--parents, peers and media--c...

Most medical interaction studies have been conducted on audiotaped recordings of physician-patient encounters. Empirical studies have not previously demonstrated whether coders' scores differ on audio-only versus videotaped data. Data from a convenience sample of forty-seven physician-patient interactions were analyzed using the same coding systems...

Recent theoretical approaches to the etiology of eating disorders and body image disturbances have begun to focus on multifactorial models. In the current study, the Tripartite Influence model was examined in a large sample of college females (ages 18–22). This model proposes that three primary core sources of influence—parents, peers and media—con...

The stepladder technique was designed to improve team decision making by staggering members' entry into a discussion (S. G. Rogelberg, J. L. Bames-Farrell, & C. A. Lowe, 1992). After examining the real and perceived influence exerted by members joining the discussion at different stepladder stages, the authors compared the technique's effects on fa...

The stepladder technique was designed to improve team decision making by staggering members'. entry into a discussion (S. G. Rogelberg, J. L. Bames-Farrell, & C. A. Lowe, 1992). After examining the real and perceived influence exerted by members joining the discussion at different stepladder stages, the authors compared the technique's effects on f...

This paper describes a methodology related to measurement and feedback for distributed team training. Levels of analysis, levels of measurement, specific measures, and feedback strategies are addressed. A Web-based system was developed which permitted gathering and manipulating performance data and providing rapid feedback to participants. Pending...

The Airborne Warning and Control System (AWACS) is a core command and control (C2) function in which sensors, shooters, and refuelers are managed by "Weapons Directors" (WDs) in an airborne radar and communications command post. Improving the quality of WD training can have profound effects on mission outcome. A basic technology capable of doing th...

Although prior research has demonstrated the utility of both alcohol expectancies and drinking motives in the prediction of alcohol use and problems, the specific relationship between these domains has not been examined in a clinical sample. One-hundred, forty-seven veterans on an inpatient substance abuse unit completed questionnaires measuring al...

This volume, intended for students and business professionals, provides an introduction to Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW). The authors illustrate CSCW in action and discuss general trends in computer support systems including artificial intelligence, extended realities, and new strategies for interacting with technology. The changing jo...

This study investigates the effects of an intelligent agent's participation during team decision making. We compare intelligent agents and knowledgeable humans in terms of their relative influences over team judgments. Results indicate that intelligent agents exert disproportionate amounts of influence, even when they provide poor recommendations....

Rough set analysis is used as a methodology to identify the relative importance of variables for individuals who interact with various computer and other display and communication systems aboard Airborne Warning and Control Systems (AWACS). A goal of the analysis is to determine optimal information display and interpersonal interaction strategies t...

Determining the overall fit of a model is an important step in the application of structural equation modeling. Due to the sensitivity of the chi-square test of exact fit, one is unlikely to find a statistically plausible model. Therefore a whole set of descriptive measures have been developed to reflect, in practical terms, the degree to which a m...

Clinical trials are the primary means for determining new, effective treatments for cancer patients, yet the number of patients that accrue is relatively limited. The purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between physician behavior and patient accrual to a clinical trial by videotaping the interaction. Forty-eight patient-physician...

To evaluate the role of appearance-based social comparison processes as a possible mediational link between developmental factors (negative social feedback, i.e., teasing about appearance; biological status, i.e., early physical maturation) and levels of body dissatisfaction, eating disturbance, and global psychological functioning. In this study o...

Objective To evaluate the role of appearance-based social comparison processes as a possible mediational link between developmental factors (negative social feedback, i.e., teasing about appearance; biological status, i.e.,early physical maturation) and levels of body dissatisfaction, eating disturbance, and global psychological functioning.Method...

Most job-related decisions are based on information concerning the nature of structure of work. For example, the extent to which certain aspects of the job are separable and critical for successful performance often serve as inputs to an organization's performance management and compensation systems. Because the information needs to be as veridical...

The stepladder technique is a method for improving face-to-face (FTF) team problem solving. The purpose of this study was to determine whether or not the stepladder technique benefits computer-mediated (CM) teams of individuals. Hypotheses addressed the effects of communication media and decision making technique on team decision quality, decision...

Covariance structure modeling (CSM) and longitudinal analyses were used to identify a possible causal sequence for factors that might lead to the development of body image and eating disturbance in adolescent females. In Study 1, subjects were measured for level of obesity, perceived weight status, maturational timing, history of being teased about...

A fuzzy cognitive map (FCM) is a graphical means of representing arbitrarily complex models of interrelated concepts, the implications of which can be calculated simply via matrix algebra. The paper discusses the use of FCMs for providing qualitative information about complex models in social and behavioral science research; specifically we show ho...

Cette étude porte sur la structure de la satisfaction professionnelle dans un établissement industriel indien. Elle fait appel à une démarche analytique factorielle de confirmation. On a utilisé le ‘Job Satisfaction Survey’ (JSS; Spector, 1985) pour mesurer la satisfaction au travail de 206 employés d'une société indienne de taille moyenne. Six mod...

Antecedent variables under the broad categories of genetic, environmental and cultural influences have been linked to the risk for alcohol abuse. Such risk factors have not been shown to result in high correlations with alcohol consumption and leave unclear an understanding of the mechanism by which these variables lead to increased risk. This stud...

We developed a prototype of a rule-based expert system that facilitates a mapping from tasks comprising a job to the knowledge, skills, and abilities (KSAs) ostensibly required to perform the tasks. A variant of fuzzy logic was employed in the inference process. Signal detection theory was used to evaluate the performance of the system. The results...

Job analysis techniques rely upon the recall of job knowledge from memory, yet little is known about how job information is organized. Five models (four schematically derived and one statistically based) were developed and examined for their effects on the ratings of time spent. Analyses indicate any of the strategies for organizing statements abou...

Two studies examined the role of characteristics that are important to consider in the development of computerized training systems. The first study employed covariance structure modeling and tested a hypothesized model regarding the relationship among three latent variables and a set of measured variables serving as indicators for the latent varia...

Problem-solving performance with tabular and graphical computer displays was examined as problem type, number progression, and memory capacity were systematically manipulated. Participants used tables and line graphs that depicted linear or multilinear number progressions to solve location, interpolation, trend analysis, and forecasting problems. E...

The Petri net formalism offers a viable means to test and evaluate theories of team performance and effectiveness. The approach can further serve theory development and testing via generation and assessment of alternative plausible hypotheses regarding team performance. Petri nets are also useful as a basis to develop process measures of team perfo...

Research in the area of mental models (Coovert, 1987; 1990; Coovert, LaLomia, & Salas, 1989) has suggested that training individuals about a procedural device can be enhanced by providing learners with a conceptual model of the device. A conceptual model conveys the underlying structure of the device, and aids the user in inferring the procedures n...

Previous team decision-making research is reviewed and a Petri net representation of the replenishment-at-sea task is described. Three alternative Petri net representations of a team task are then presented. A functional representation which relies on a top-down decomposition of the task by function is a clear representation, but it lacks informati...

The research explored the adequacy of a schematic model of social perception (Reeder & Brewer, 1979) as an explanation of the negativity effect in impression formation. The model holds that when the target of an impression is an individual or a meaningful group, observers will view the target's behavior as an integrated whole (an assumption of unit...

provide a conceptual introduction to covariance structure modeling (CSM), an analytic technique of considerable value for theory and research in personality and social psychology define and describe CSM, and present arguments for the contributions it can make to personality/social research sections on the mathematical framework for CSM / concep...

A covariance structure model was tested that related 3 classes of predictors (ability, experience, and supervisor support) to several classes of criteria of task performance (rated performance by self, supervisor, and peers, a work sample test, and training success). The model was tested for 3 categories of tasks (installation of engine parts, insp...

The three existing approaches to user modeling-GOMS (goals, operators, methods, and selection rules), production simulation, and mental models-are examined. Each approach is described, relevant experimental research is reviewed, and each approach is summarized in terms of its advantages, limitations, and applicability to the system design process....

The development of a complete theory of human-computer interaction has been hindered by the lack of full scale testable models. To date, those models which have been tested are primarily low-level (e.g., key-stroke; Card, Moran, & Newell, 1983). Although providing clear predictions, they rarely provide information on more than just a few low level...

The focus in building expert systems has typically been to build them to be as powerful as possible. These systems continue to impact directly or indirectly on nearly every aspect of our lives. Among the myriad applications which currently exist, expert systems have been designed to diagnose medical problems (Buchnan & Shortliffe, 1984), instruct s...

As the amount of information accessible via computer systems increases, so do problems associated with presenting information that can be assimilated easily and accurately. Many researchers advocate the graphical presentation of information to allow for effortless perception and organization of information. Research in many diverse areas has focuse...

The focus in building expert systems has typically been to build them to be as powerful as possible. These systems continue to impact directly or indirectly on nearly every aspect of our lives. Among the myriad applications which currently exist, expert systems have been designed to diagnose medical problems (Buchnan a Shortliffe, 1984), instruct s...

Determining the number of common factors is one of the most important decisions which must be made in the application of factor analysis. Several different approaches and techniques are reviewed here along with associated strengths and weaknesses. It is argued that a combination of approaches will lead to the best judgment regarding the number of f...

The construct validity of job performance ratings obtained from self, supervisors, and peers was assessed relative to performance data obtained from an objective test of task proficiency. Data were gathered from a sample of 256 first-term jet engine mechanics in the U.S. Air Force. Widaman's (1985) approach to assessment of convergent and discrimin...