Patricia A Shewokis

Patricia A. Shewokis, PhD, is a professor who integrates her interdisciplinary, collaborative research experiences that focus on the transfer of learning and cognitive load theory while addressing the interaction of the brain, consequent behaviors and the attainment of outcomes and goals within an array of learning environments. During the training of medical and health professions personnel, the inclusion of virtual environments is important for learning skills that may potentially be risky in nonsimulated environments. She has worked with surgeons, nurses and other health professionals in creating training protocols for the acquisition of medical skills in simulated environments with the rationale that these skills will be performed in the real-life conditions with lower cognitive effort, increased accuracy and less time. She has over 14 years’ experience working with noninvasive neuroimaging (e.g., functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) and electroencephalography (EEG)) along with extensive experience with physiological, kinematic, kinetic and outcome measures. Her teaching integrates her research interests in transfer and learning and cognitive load theory in the design of the courses she teaches. Over her teaching career, she has focused on instruction on statistical analyses, measurement principles, research methods, applications of learning principles, task analyses along with memory/generalizability protocols and assessments. Over the past five years, she has developed various methods to quantitatively assess cognitive workload using neuroimaging and behavioral outcomes that are based on some human factors work from the Netherlands.