Prof. Raymond M Klein, Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology & Neuroscience, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canada gave a Distinguished Lecture on Applications of Experimental Psychology to Real World Problems on 14 August.
Dr. Klein is an internationally recognized expert on human attention and its relation to eye movements. His standing in the field was recognized by the Canadian Society for Brain, Behavior and Cognitive Science with the 2008 Donald O. Hebb Distinguished Contribution Award and his induction into the Royal Society of Canada.
Dr. Klein has, since his first sabbatical at Bell Telephone Laboratories, regularly sought to apply his expertise in experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience to help solve real-world problems. His applied interests include attention deficits (in ADHD, autism, Parkinson’s patients, people with damage to the parietal lobe), the development of game-like tasks for repairing and assessing the networks of attention, safety (while driving, in the management of off-shore disasters, and pilot fatigue), using eye monitoring to draw conclusions about attention in every-day activities (reading, looking at art and looking at money). He highlighted some of these applied projects in his lecture.