Health & Performance

Environmental cues, health issues and individual differences can have a dramatic impact on task performance. Psychology professor Dr. Eric Muth and his Creative Inquiry team, Human Stress and Motion Science Laboratory, focus on human performance and health. The goal of their research is to improve human performance and facilitate healthy behaviors and decision-making. The students in this Creative Inquiry participate in data collection, propose research topics and set up experiments.

“The students help on a variety of levels, all the way from intellectual contributions to the grunt work, and a lot of what we do, we couldn’t do without them,” Muth explained. Sometimes the grunt work is very hands-on and exciting, but other times it is just logging data, so the students experience a range of aspects of research in experimental psychology.

Muth’s lab is currently focused on several different studies. As a result, students involved with his Creative Inquiry are exposed to multiple projects from a wide range of topics. The team includes students from different majors, which provides a diverse perspective on different ideas. “The CI group has given me countless = opportunities to get hands-on learning experience that you simply cannot get in the classroom. Not only do you gain knowledge, but you also get to work in a research setting that will help prepare you for school and work beyond undergrad,” Jenna Darrah, senior psychology major, commented.

Three studies commenced in the fall of 2015. One study focused on tracking wrist activity and monitored when people ate. The purpose of this study was to create an algorithm to allow for the automated detection of eating activities for use in a wearable intake monitor. It was an observational study in which 500 subjects wore an electronic wrist monitor for a day and marked the beginning and end of their meals. The second study focused on improving a calorie per bite algorithm to be used in a wearable intake monitor. Participants wore an intake monitor on their wrist while using a smartphone to document the foods they ate for two weeks. That information was paired with data from the wrist monitor to compare calorie and bite information collected from both devices. A third study focused on how expectations affect pain perception.

The opportunity for students to learn and garner research experience outside of the classroom is invaluable. It allows undergraduates to participate in research projects they are interested in and learn everything from setting up an experiment to analyzing the data collected. “I encourage them to ask questions because that’s how they’re going to learn, and their questions, we may never have thought of before or thought about how they asked the question,” Muth explained. The students bring in a fresh set of ideas that stem from their curiosities and through this they become better scientists and researchers.