Astrid Schmidt-Nielsen

Cognitive and Neurosciences Division

Office of Naval Research

Brief Biography:

Astrid Schmidt-Nielsen is a program officer in the Cognitive and Neurosciences Division at the Office of Naval Research. Before coming to ONR, she was at the Naval Research Laboratory, as an engineering psychologist and head of the Interface Design and Evaluation Section in the Information Technology Division. She received her A.B. degree in biology from Oberlin College and her Ph.D. (1974) in experimental psychology from the University of Maryland. After a two-year post-doc at the University of Minnesota, she went to the Naval Research Laboratory, where her research interests have ranged from cognitive processes to speech perception, speaker recognition, and the evaluation of voice communication systems. She is a fellow of the Acoustical Society of America and of the American Psychological Association, and she is a former president of Division 21 (Applied Experimental and Engineering Psychology) of the American Psychological Association.

Short Program Description:

This program is a part of the Human Factors program in the Cognitive and Neuosciences Division and focuses on attention, perception, and data visualization for Navy displays. The emphasis of the program is on human perception and performance as it relates to the presentation and display of complex information, and it focuses on basic research in psychological and cognitive science, with an emphasis on attention management and the presentation of complex data. Topics of interest include perceptual, attentional, and cognitive constraints on human performance for Navy displays, information display, auditory and visual, scientific and tactical visualization, as well as cognitive modeling of user interactions for predicting performance.