L. James Smart
Teaching Interests
I believe that teaching is composed of four functions: providing information, knowledge, and guidance about the topic being taught, honing students’ ability to evaluate this knowledge and seek further knowledge, illuminating the relevance of the course material for everyday life, and encouraging students to seek opportunities for further work in the field through research and mentoring. With these functions in mind, my approach to the classroom setting has been to set the course content in the context of questions to be answered or problems to be solved by the class with my help. My goal is to empower students by not just giving them the “answer” but helping to develop the skills that would allow them to find or generate “answers” on their own.
Research Interests
What happens when the perceptual information obtained does not support action or actions that the organism is familiar with? My research involves examining the consequences of disrupting the perception-action cycle on participants’ ability to successfully regulate their behavior. In particular, I am interested in how functional relationships between perception and action are regained (adaptation) and the cost of not being able to do so (motion sickness). My research bridges interests in motor control, perception, and Human Factors.
Selected Publications
- Gong, M. & Smart, L. J. (2021). The anger superiority effect revisited: A visual crowding task. Cognition and Emotion 35 (2)214-224, DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2020.1818552 Published online (Sept 2020).
- Teaford, M., Fitzpatrick, J. & Smart, L. J. (2021). The impact of experimentally induced limb ischemia on the rubber hand illusion. Perception, 50(1), 88-96. http://doi.org/10.1177/0301006620977797 Published online (Dec 2020).
- Teaford, M., McMurray, M. S., Billock, V., Filipkowski, M., & Smart, L. J. (2021). The somatosensory system in anorexia nervosa: A scoping review. Journal of Experimental Psychopathology, January-March 2021, 1-19. https://doi.org/10.1177/2043808720987346
- Smart, L. J., Hassebrock, J. A., & Teaford, M. A. (2020). Acting is Perceiving: Experiments on perception of motion in the world and movements of the self, an update. Invited chapter; J. Wagman & J. Blau (eds.) Perception as Information Detection: Reflections on Gibson’s Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. NY: Taylor & Francis.
- Teaford, M. A., Cook, H. E., Hassebrock, J. A., Thomas, R. D., & Smart, L. J. (2020). Perceptual validation of nonlinear postural predictors of visually induced motion sickness. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1533.
- Cook IV, H. E., Hassebrock, J. A., & Smart, L. J. (2018). Responding to Other People’s Posture: Visually induced motion sickness from naturally generated optic flow. Frontiers in Psychology: Movement Science and Sport Psychology, (9) 1901, doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2018.01901