My Memory with Dr. Judith Orasanu

Today, I have two latest news for you. The first news is a very good one. The second is a sad news....

Firstly, the Naturalistic Decision-Making (NDM) community recently opened their official website of the NDM Association, NDMA. We, NDM researchers and practitioners, have investigated expertise -how experts in any fields make their judgments and decisions under life-threatening conditions. Dr. Gary Klein and other world's top cognitive psychologists revealed the mechanism of intuition and insight. Our findings are often applied to various fields and industries including military and AI research.

Originally, many NDM resarchers used to belong to Cognitive Engineering of Decision Making, a branch of the US Human Factors and Ergonomics Society (HFES). However, the NDM communicty launched an independent oragnization. As far as you have strong passion to study NDM, you can join this association. Especially, any undergraduate and graduate students who are interested in NDM are encouraged to become student members.

Visit the official website of the NDMA and complete your application:

https://naturalisticdecisionmaking.org

The next news is that Dr. Judith Orasanu, one of the initiators of the NDM movement, recently had passed away. Dr. Orasanu worked for NASA as a cogntive psychologist who specialized in the relationship between human and machine, group decision making, errors, and others. Since the initiaton of the NDM movement, she had greatly contributed to NDM research and education.

In June, 2019, Dr. Orasanu was a lecturer at the NDM-14 in San Francisco. Her lecture was about history and future of NDM studies. I was deeply impressed to hear that she had a hard time when she advocated the NDM theories with Dr. Klein in the late 1980s. American and European academia refused to accept their studies. In some cases, she and the first generation of NDM researchers were severely criticized by other academicians because they thought NDM lacks scientific rigor unlike experimental psychology. Experimental psychology has been regarded as the mainstram of cognitive psychology for many years.

Today, NDM became one of the most influential psychological studies. I remember her remarks udring the lecture that she entrusted the future of NDM studies to the next generation. Unfortunately, I can no longer learn NDM from Dr. Orasanu directly. However, her studies and passion continue to inspire me to promote my research.