Our lab seeks to train future basic scientists for careers in research and teaching, but we also have some applied projects.  Our basic research efforts mainly look at the strategies people use in various laboratory tasks.  A subtheme is the nature of executive processes (like "working memory") and whether or how executive processes place limits on the strategies people employ.  Of course, our ultimate interest isn't in studying tasks that are found only in laboratories -- we're interested in what those tasks tell us more generally about problem solving and memory.  Our applied work takes some of the ideas we developed in the lab and applies them to everyday problems such as improving decision making of drivers and traffic engineers, and studying ways that medical doctors can improve the memories of older adult patients who visit their offices.

   To get an idea of the ultimate power of study strategies to improve learning, consider our research on a memory expert named Rajan.  Rajan is famous for having learned tens of thousands of digits of pi (3.141519...) and he's capable of learning lists of 50 digits with virtually perfect accuracy in about a minute of study (Ericsson, Delaney, Weaver & Mahadevan, 2004).  We concluded that exceptional skills derived from years of practice were responsible for Rajan's abilities, and not innate talents.  Not only memory experts show exceptional memory:  so do doctors, musicians, and others (Ericsson & Delaney, 1999). 

   Even in simple list learning experiments, people can change strategies after self-evaluation.  People often switch from rehearsal-based study strategies to more elaborative strategies.  We have shown that these strategy changes can be triggered by instructions to "forget" earlier-learned material or by asking people to evaluate their own performance (Sahakyan, Delaney & Kelley, 2004; Sahakyan & Delaney, 2003), and that similar strategy changes can affect the basis (or even the existence) of spacing effects (Delaney & Knowles, 2005).   Spacing effects refer to the well-known finding that the same amount of study time is more effectively used by viewing each item on a list twice than by viewing each item only once (but for longer).

Problem Solving & Decision Making Research

   Our other work is concerned with problem solving and decision processes.  Executive processes and memory strategies are, of course, implicated in the ways people approach problem solving and decision making, but there are other factors that may be even more important.  One kind of strategy we have studied is planning, including how planning strategies change over time, why people choose particular planning strategies, and how planning can facilitate learning (Delaney, Ericsson & Knowles, 2004). 

  More recently, we have been exploring ways to teach people to avoid illegal moves (moves that break rules).  Illegal moves are important because they limit planning ahead and may lead to important consequences when errors are costly -- such as in air traffic control tasks.  We have developed a framework for understanding how a particular manipulation that reduces illegal moves does its work (Knowles & Delaney, in press).

Methods for Investigating Memory and Thinking

   Our lab has refined methods for attacking scientific problems.  In general, all of these approaches are aimed at discovering the strategies that people use on various tasks and on how those strategies impact various psychological effects.

   Gaining control over peoples' strategies often leads to insights into the basic theoretical mechanisms that underlie various phenomena.  The same three basic laboratory techniques have proven successful for our lab in a variety of different domains:  tracking strategies, constraining strategies, and controlling strategies.  Tracking strategies involves collecting concurrent or retrospective verbal reports (a technique made famous by my graduate advisor, K. Anders Ericsson).  Naturally, it is important to know what techniques elicit valid verbal reports, and what produces mere introspective guesswork!  Constraining strategies involves taking steps to interfere with the mechanisms assumed to underlie exceptional performance in a task.  Tasks can often be designed to reduce the level of performance only if people are using a particular strategy.  Finally, controlling strategies involves instructing people to approach the task in a certain fashion.  In this way, strategy variability is reduced or eliminated.