Presenter

James L. Szalma, Ph.D. is a professor in the Human Factors and Cognitive Psychology Ph.D. Program within the Department of Psychology at the University of Central Florida. He earned his B.S. in Chemistry from the University of Michigan in 1990, and later completed both his M.A. (1997) and Ph.D. (1999) in Applied Experimental and Human Factors Psychology at the University of Cincinnati. Dr. Szalma directs the Performance Research Laboratory, which focuses on how task demands interact with individual differences, such as cognitive abilities, personality, emotion, and motivation, to affect performance, workload, and stress in cognitively demanding tasks.

His current research interests include signal and threat detection, training methods for improving detection, and the role of individual-task interactions in sustained attention and human-automation systems. He is also exploring the use of video game-based tasks to train attention, the motivational influences on performance and social media use, and the impact of social context on cognitive performance and workload. Additionally, he has investigated the application of Fuzzy Signal Detection Theory for evaluating performance in threat detection scenarios.