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11.02.04 Mary Julia Moore Erskine student participates in National Science Foundation program Mary Julia Moore joined a select group at Clemson University last summer as a participant in a National Science Foundation (NSF) research project. Moore, a senior psychology major from Athens, Ga., almost surprised herself when she decided to come to Erskine four years ago. "I had looked at Vanderbilt, Georgia and several other large schools," she said. "I certainly was not thinking about a smaller college." But when Moore interned for Keith Burrell '91, a youth pastor and Erskine graduate, he talked her into accompanying him to Preview Day. "I wasn't here 10 minutes before I fell in love with it," Moore said. "To me, the people said everything about the school." Erskine was the 16th college she visited. "Erskine was the first place where I felt like this could be home for the next four years," Moore said. Psychology professor Dr. John Showalter has served as Moore's mentor since her freshman year. "Dr. Showalter has been a lot more than a professor," Moore said. "He's been there as a mentor and that has helped to open up the world of psychology in a way that I never dreamed possible." Showalter recommended that Moore apply for the NSF research spot and is quick to laud her academic abilities. "Mary Julia possesses a powerful intellectual curiosity and well-honed work ethic," he said. "Those characteristics combine to make her a fine scholar and, especially with her experimental work at Erskine and NSF, a promising researcher." Showalter said the NSF program recruited nationally to fill 12 slots. "Mary Julia not only won a slot, but also distinguished herself in the midst of some very good fellow students," he said. Moore said she applied for the program at Showalter's suggestion. "I didn't think too much about it," she said. "Then I got a call that I had been accepted. I was one of 12 students in North America selected for the program." So at the end of May, when many students were headed home for the summer, Moore packed up and went to Clemson. The research project that Moore participated in was "Human Factors and Teleoperations." Human factors, she said, is a term used for making scientific equipment user-friendly, while teleoperations refers to equipment used in remote environments. "When events occur such as September 11th or dangerous nuclear power plant meltdowns, a need arises to survey the area for survivors without inadvertently risking the lives of the rescue workers," Moore explained in an abstract she plans to present next spring at a Southeastern Psychological Association conference in Nashville, Tenn. She said a robot capable of entering those environments, videoing the area and relaying the video feed back to the rescue crew could help rescue workers determine if there are survivors left inside. A robot has been assembled that can travel through the areas, but there is still some "difficulty in using remote vision effectively." Depth and size are understood on a daily basis, but the information is lost during remote perception, Moore said. "If we can make the robot’s camera follow the same path as the viewer's head, hypothetically the perception error can be eliminated," she said. "The goal is to augment the video feed in such a way as to recover what was lost by decoupling the human perceptual processor from the natural environment so that a remote observer has sufficient information available to his senses to effectively function as if he were directly perceiving and acting in the remote environment." Students used the hypothesis that a head-coupled method of controlling the robot's movement would yield significant results. They designed a mock remote environment complete with two robotic arms and made targets to be placed in the remote environment and moved the first robotic arm, which had a camera attached to it, toward and away from the target. The movement was controlled by one of three methods – passive (via computer), joystick, or head-coupled (using a device called "Flock of Birds"). Six Clemson students were used as subjects and they did 30 trials each for each condition, doing only one condition a day, and the results were not consistent with the hypothesis. Moore worked hand in hand with another student, Ashley Baber, of James Madison University. Clemson professor Dr. Chris Pagano helped the students design the experiment. She said the experiment was in applied psychology, but she's leaning toward a career in social psychology. "It was kind of like a real world preview," Moore said. The summer concluded with a conference at which students could present their work to the public, she said. Moore said she was glad for the opportunity to do research in the NSF program, but was happy to return to Erskine. "It was fun to be at Clemson, but I missed Erskine," she said. "It's great to be back."
Pictured above, one of the robotic arms used in Moore's research |
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