Biography
I received my PhD in Sensory Psychology in 1999 from Indiana University Blooming and completed post-doctoral training in the GRASP Lab at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science at the University of Pennsylvania. I came to UCF in 2007 after a stint as part of the Human Factors Psychology faculty at Wichita State University. At UCF I have continued to conduct basic and applied perception-action research while teaching within the undergraduate program.
Publications
Mouloua, S. A., McConnell, D. S., & Hancock, P. A. (2022). The Resource Pool is Dry: A Model for Surfing the
Waves of Energy. Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting, 66(1), 828‐832.
Necaise, A., Moralez, L.A., Favela, L.H., Amon, M.J., McConnell, D.S. (2021). Perception‐action calibration as a function of judgment method and feedback type. Association for Psychological Science 2021 Virtual Convention.
Sermarini, J., Kider Jr, J. T., LaViola Jr, J. J., & McConnell, D. S. (2021, September). A Kinematic Evaluation of
Linear and Parabolic Pointing in Virtual Reality. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society
Annual Meeting (Vol. 65, No. 1, pp. 86‐90)
Rupp, M. A., McConnell, D. S., & Smither, J. A. (2019). Examining associations between action game play and
motor control. Acta Psychologica, 193, 55‐65.
McConnell, D. S. (2019, November). Precision constraints during pointing with a stylus: Implications for Fitts’
law. In Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting (Vol. 63, No. 1, pp. 1756‐
1760)
Research Areas
My research in perception/action focuses on affordances, and the visual control of reaching and pointing movements. In our lab, we study the use of visual feedback in the control of target pointing movements. We are also interested in the contributions of visual and haptic spatial perception, especially in the context of reaching movements. We are also looking at these issues in the context of aging, with the goal of understanding the contributions of visual and physical factors to changes in motor performance in the aging population. We have also extended our work into applied areas such as Human-Computer Interaction, using a perception/action approach to studying the usability of input devices in complex control tasks. Most recently, I have been interested in extending the affordance-based perception/action approach into other domains, such as human-robot interaction, direct social perception, and the study of human performance in virtual environments.
