Kate Arrington: Researching the Researchers

Housed in Lehigh’s new Health, Science & Technology (HST) Building, the labs of NHI—including its cutting-edge Data Visualization Lab—are at any one time buzzing with the kind of activity reflective of the broad scope of the researchers and fields of study involved. A visitor to HST may see materials scientists engaged in microscopy, computer scientists developing new apps and programs in support of their materials science colleagues, and graduate and undergraduate students working across teams and disciplines toward the broader efforts of NHI.

What that same visitor may not see, however, is the work being done somewhat behind the scenes—by a team of visionary Lehigh cognitive psychologists—that may allow those very researchers to take their work to the next level, help them learn how to better utilize new and emerging technologies, and possibly revolutionize the very art of research itself.

Led by Kate Arrington, a professor in the psychology department and Cognitive Science program, the work is in many ways emblematic of the research ethos of Lehigh—a university that boasts a thriving culture of interdisciplinary research and team science. At the same time, Arrington’s research also recognizes that even in a thriving team science setting, there is always room to do better.

Through her “lab within a lab” at HST, Arrington is studying the way NHI researchers work, examining their habits, achievements and challenges—everything down to their eye movements, reaction time, conversations and even hand gestures—to ultimately find ways to create new efficiencies not only in a cutting-edge lab setting such as the Data Visualization Lab, but also in various team science environments across campus.

“One of the things we’re looking at in this work is how an individual human engages in the environment in which they’re working and how you can modify that environment to nudge people in behavioral directions that you would like to support,” Arrington says. “So one of the things we’re doing in this space is wanting to observe the scientist at work— and there are a lot of reasons for wanting to do that, including the fact that it gives us a large data set. We are manipulating environments, we are measuring behaviors, and we have hypotheses about how those behaviors are going to change in the different conditions in the experimental environment based on theories of cognition.”

Post-doctoral fellow David Braun, who has worked with Arrington, adds, “We are thinking about how we can design more optimal interfaces given what we know about how the human mind processes information. Can we make it more intuitive? Can we make things easier for collaboration? For problem-solving? So we want to design experiments that might give us insight into how scientists process information and then use those insights to optimize this lab environment.”

The work is somewhat unique in the world of cognitive psychology and presents a number of challenges both large and small. But, like their colleagues being studied in the NHI “Lab Lab,” Arrington shares a conviction with them that, with time, her team’s investigation and observation into every last nuance of how science is conducted at NHI will bear real dividends—not only for researchers at Lehigh, but elsewhere as well.

“We have the scientists watching the scientists,” Arrington says. “And that is a lot of fun to be able to do.”

“One of the things we don’t want to do with this new technology is make things more ‘effortful’ for the scientist,” she says. “Hopefully, you know, the goal is that increasing the technical tools that they have for data visualization and scientific decision- making will make the job easier. But that’s not always going to be true. You’ll try some things, and sometimes, people will say, ‘Yeah, it’s a fancy new tool, but it just feels harder to get the information in there than how I’m used to doing it.’ So we’re looking at these important questions of what is happening in this multitasking environment.

“When we start introducing augmented reality, we ask whether it makes research more effortful. But the bigger question is: Does it change decision-making and make that decision-making better? So if it’s more effortful but your decisions are better, and you’re doing the science more cleanly, then maybe you do want to put in a little more effort?”

As technology continues to race forward, the strain can be particularly profoundly felt by “experts” in their fields, Braun notes. These are individuals who are accustomed to working a certain way, with certain tools. As the recent research bore out, this gives them advantages over less experienced researchers—at least in a traditional setting.

When new technologies are introduced, however, those advantages are diminished.

“We had a range of expertise for people in this experiment,” Braun says. “We had ‘experts’ all the way down to ‘novices,’ and we tested them in two situations—one of which was in the traditional situation that they were used to and one of which was a slightly modified version that goes more toward being remote, so that data that they would usually be looking at in a microscope, they were now looking at on a computer screen, which would be easier to transition to more remote environments, which is one of our goals. But there is some literature in the cognitive side that says, ‘Well, if you mess with something an expert is very used to, the expert is going to struggle with that new interface.”

In a sense, what the team found was that—at least initially—the introduction of new technology leveled the playing field, temporarily, between experts and novices in the field being studied.

“The expert outperformed everyone by miles in a traditional context—that’s what that person is very used to—but they also really struggled with this new context,” Braun says. “Whereas these newer people performed equally across the traditional and new contexts [but] they struggled overall. So this study reveals that, unlike for novices, experts will likely have to unlearn a lot of old habits when adapting to a new interface— this means we can’t evaluate how good a new interface is based on an expert’s initial performance, we need to take a bigger picture into account.”

The Science of Team Science

Arrington’s work is so respected on campus at Lehigh that she is now also extending her “research into research’ into a longstanding area of interest to the university community: team science.

With the support of $1 million National Science Foundation Predictive Intelligence for Pandemic Preparedness (PIPP) grant, and working in collaboration with Jagota, Arrington, in the fall of 2022, began work on another initiative that could help a team of Lehigh researchers learn to collaborate and communicate more effectively in the context of a broader effort to improve pandemic responsiveness—and specifically, in the context of Indigenous communities, which are typically more isolated than other communities and face a unique set of challenges during pandemics.

The questions Arrington is seeking to answer in this work cut across the most fundamental aspects of team science and could unlock new pathways to help researchers work more effectively both with individuals within their fields and those in other fields.

“One piece of what we are going to do in this space—and this moves beyond NHI—is research specifically looking at ‘the science of team science,’” she says. “For instance: How do a group of interdisciplinary researchers—maybe some who have collaborated before but probably who haven’t— effectively start to share knowledge about their disciplines?”

This initiative involves contributions from fields including psychology, bioengineering, materials science and computer science, among various others, and faculty from Lehigh’s innovative College of Health—13 faculty in all from eight different departments. Their work was to extend 18 months through the planning grant period, during which the team would then work together in hopes of securing an even larger grant.

To begin to better understand how the group worked together either effectively or ineffectively, and the challenges they would face, Arrington and her team began their investigation by recording their working meetings in both audio and video. The idea—similar to her work at NHI—is to capture language, conversations, mannerisms, gestures and anything else that might offer clues as to when the group is working in sync or when roadblocks are being put up. By gathering and decoding this data, Arrington hopes to create a base upon which greater collaboration might be built.

“So the question here is: ‘How do we share knowledge from members of the team with people who are not in our area?’ And one of the things I’m very interested in is whether the scientists, when speaking to their disciplinary team, are speaking differently than to those with whom they don’t typically work together. Do they gesture differently when there is assumed common knowledge about something within their thread, versus when you’ve got the whole group together and you’ve got people who are outside your discipline? Do you change the way you’re gesturing to support their knowledge?”

It’s a baseline study in team cognition, Arrington says. And its implications could spur innovation in team science across the campus. For a university such as Lehigh, which has so long valued interdisciplinary work, and whose size affords it the ability to leverage multiple fields of study within a tight-knit campus setting, this is no small consideration.

“We do hit the sweet spot in size for this sort of interdisciplinary research,” Arrington says. “It gives us the opportunity to have robust research programs with graduate students involved. But we are small enough that when you’re in faculty meetings, when you’re having lunch on or near campus, you’re talking with people from a lot of different disciplines, and I think that’s so valuable for researchers, no matter their field.”

Kate Arrington’s research interests focus on the cognitive control, attention and working memory processes engaged during volitional multitask behavior. She received her Ph.D. in psychology from Michigan State University. David Braun’s research investigates how people perceive and make choices around mental effort. He received his Ph.D. from Lehigh University.

Story by Tim Hyland

Interviews by Kelly Hochbein