Robert J. Youmans, PhD
Research
Dr. Youmans’ research focuses not simply on creative behaviors in design and engineering, but also on the basic cognitive and social mechanisms thought to be responsible for creative behaviors. These mechanisms include controlled attention, situation awareness, task-set switching, working memory, judgment and decision-making, language, and group processes. Dr. Youmans also conducts research on other applied cognitive topics including methods of enhancing learning in higher education, and the safe, efficient, and intuitive design of commercial products and systems.
Dr. Youmans served as the faculty research advisor to the California State University, Northridge (CSUN) Psi Chi National Honors Society, where he and students conducted research related to the learning sciences. He was also the faculty research advisor to the CSUN Chapter of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, where he and students conducted research related to Human Factors psychology.
Dr. John Gero
Research Professor
Krasnow Institute for Advanced Study and
Volgenau School of Information Technology and Engineering and Department of Computational Social Science
George Mason University
Home Page: http://cs.gmu.edu/~jgero/
Dr. Nhut Ho
Director of SERL Laboratory
Department of Mechanical Engineering
California State University, Northridge
Home Page: http://www.ecs.csun.edu/me/ho.html
Lab Page: http://www.csun.edu/~serl/staff.html
Dr. Benjamin D. Jee
Visiting Research Professor
Holy Cross
Postdoctoral Fellow
Northwestern University
http://www.wcas.northwestern.edu/psych/people/postdoctoral_fellows/
Dr. Stellan Ohlsson
Professor of Psychology
University of Illinois at Chicago
Home Page: https://portal.psch.uic.edu/stellan.aspx
Dr. Abraham Rutchick
Assistant Professor
California State University, Northridge
Home Page: http://www.csun.edu/csbs/departments/psychology/faculty/rutchick.html
Dr. Eric Stone
Associate Professor of Psychology
Wake Forest University
Research Collaborators
Youmans, R. J. (In Review). Reactive task-set switching ability, not working memory capacity, predicts change blindness sensitivity. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J., & Ohlsson, S. (In Review). Suboptimal adaptation to instrument malfunction. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J. , & *Bae, A. H. (In Review). The effects of campus diversity on student attitudes and voting behaviors. (.PDF)
*Nettelhorst, S. C., & Youmans, R. J. (In Review). The effects of advertisement variation and need for cognition on attitude change over time. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J. (In Revisions). Dual roles for working memory capacity and task-set switching in design fixation? Journal of Creative Behavior.
*current or former laboratory students
Works in Progress
Youmans, R. J. (In Press). Does the adoption of plagiarism detection software in higher education reduce plagiarism? Studies in Higher Education. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J. (2010). The effects of physical prototyping and group work on the reduction of design fixation. Design Studies. (LINK) (.PDF)
*Damon, A. E., *Sarkissian, A., *Cotillier, C. Y.,* Staben, N. M., *Lee, J. M., & Youmans, R. J. (2010). Dressed to influence: The effects of experimenter dress on participant compliance. Undergraduate Research Journal for the Human Sciences, 9. (LINK) (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J., & Ohlsson, S. (2008). How practice produces suboptimal heuristics that render backup instruments ineffective. Ergonomics, 41, 441-475. (LINK) (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J., & Jee, B. J. (2007). Fudging the numbers: How pre-test chocolate influences instructor evaluations in an undergraduate statistics course. Teaching of Psychology, 34, 245-247. (LINK) (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J., & Stone, E. (2005). To thy own self be true: Finding the utility of cognitive feedback via extended mean squared error analysis. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 17, 319-341. (LINK) (.PDF)
*current or former laboratory students
Bellows, Brooke G., Comeford, Doreen A., & Youmans, R.J (2012). Exploring the impact of mobile device use on pedestrian navigation. Proceedings of the Fourth Applied Human Factors & Ergonomics Conference. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J. (In Press). Turning people into Petri dishes! Using random assignment to create equivalent test groups. In B.P. Scott & M. Ward (Eds.) Teaching Research Methods in Social Sciences. New York: SAGE/Pine.
Youmans, R. J. (2010). Design fixation in the wild: How physical interactions and collaboration affect fixation phenomena. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Creative Design Processes. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J., & Ohlsson, S. (2006). Fast and frugal operators sub-optimally adapt to machine failure. Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J. (2005). Playing with missing pieces: Why cognition belongs on the playing field in game design. The International Journal of Cognitive Technology, 10, 54. (.PDF)
Youmans, R. J., & Ohlsson, S. (2005). Training produces suboptimal adaptation to redundant instrument failure in a simulated human-machine interface. Proceedings of the Twenty-Seventh Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. (.PDF)
Recent Publications
Journal Publications
Book Chapters, Proceedings Papers & Other Publications
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