Coordinates: 38°59′20.0″N 76°56′33.6″W / 38.98889°N 76.942667°W / 38.98889; -76.942667
The Laboratory for Automation Psychology (LAP) (also Laboratory for Automation Psychology and Decision Processes or LAPDP) was founded in 1983 by Kent Norman and Nancy Anderson as an affiliate of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory (HCIL) at the University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies (UMIACS).
It is housed in the University of Maryland, College Park's Department of Psychology and is devoted to the study of the cognitive side of the human/computer interface with an emphasis on the processes of judgment and decision making. Research has covered a wide range of topics from menu selection to direct manipulation and from user satisfaction to computer rage.
Research in the LAP has been supported by corporations such as AT&T, Sperry, and IBM and by U.S. federal agencies such as NASA, NSF, NRL, and the U.S. Census Bureau.
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