Why I study... driving

There is a short pragmatic explanation to this, and a rather longer one. The short explanation is that having submitted my PhD on unconscious processing to The Queen's University of Belfast in 1984, and lectured for a year at the University of Ulster, there were very few jobs about. I noticed an advertisement for a research officer with Ivan Brown at the Applied Psychology Unit in Cambridge, working on psychological aspects of driving. I was learning to drive at the time, and I knew nothing more about it than that; but I needed a job and applied speculatively. I don't know quite why, but the interview panel appointed me. Since then, for what is now almost 15 years, the role of cognition in skilled everyday performance has been the focus of my research effort.

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