About Jason

Welcome! I’m Jason Wong. This site serves as my professional web presence. I have a blog where I rant about human factors-related issues. I also have links to presentations, publications, and my vita.

Be sure to visit the blog section of this site (which used to be the homepage) at http://www.wongjason.com/blog/.


Jason enjoying the Washington, DC Cherry Blossom Festival in 2008


I am a Human Factors Scientist with the Naval Undersea Warfare Center in Newport, RI. The Human-Systems Integration group there does a lot of human factors work on submarines, from information displays to cognitive modeling and submariner training. I am excited about working in this entirely foreign environment. I am looking forward to applying my theory-driven vision research in an applied domain such as submarines.

In May of 2009, I graduated with my Ph.D. from the Human Factors and Applied Cognition program at George Mason University, where my dissertation advisor was Dr. Matthew Peterson. I received my bachelor’s degree in Psychology from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in May 2004. I started out as a computer science major, but I soon realized that I wasn’t cut out for it. I still wanted to work with computers, and that led me to discover human-computer interaction, cognitive psychology and related fields. I have broad interests in how visual attention affects how information is processed.

One of my major research themes explores the relationship between attention and working memory. Another theme looks at visual search performance in dual-task situations, which occurs often in the real world. With the US Navy, I have been developing a cognitive model for a complex ship navigation task and exploring different interaction devices to increase efficiency with submarine systems and interacting with collaborative virtual worlds.

In my spare time, I enjoy non-work-related reading, television (The Office, 30 Rock, and a number of sci-fi shows) cooking, and traveling. I am also a complete technology geek, but Mac OS X only. I used to be a Windows user, but I’ve been spoiled by Macs. I’m sure that Macintosh usability (good and bad) will be the topic of many posts on my blog.