A little about me
I go by Rebecca, for one thing. I'm bigger on current and future goals and ambitions than I am on past successful and failed attempts. I primarily study human visual attention. I want to understand how we humans can attend to some things, but miss (fail to attend) to other things. Using the behavioral metrics behind eye-tracking, scientists can study where and how we are alloting ("paying") attention to some things while tuning out other things. Regardless of how sharp our attention may seem at any given moment, we filter out far more information than we can take in. Much of this happens at the level of perception--before our human cognition can kick in. In other words, after we've sensed information from our environment, we use our perception and attention to interpret not only what we are seeing, but also to guide our vision to it's next focal point. Using eye tracking allows scientists to record human gaze behavior on a millisecond to millisecond basis. Tracking the human gaze and attempting to predict changes of gaze behavior depends, in part, on what we are looking at and what we are looking for. Eye tracking research has benefitted the world of radiology by studying how experts "search" for abnormalities on radiographs. K9 teams consist of a human reading a detection dog in the moment, however.
I'm a nontraditional graduate student and my mentor is Dr. Michael C. Hout. I study at the Vision Sciences and Memory Lab at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces, New Mexico. Prior to returning to graduate school for a PhD, I worked as a clinical social worker in central New Mexico for about six years. Going much further back in my biography would take you across both the USA and the Atlantic, however. So I'll stop there. If you'd like to know more, just ask me.
In my "spare" time, I work two detection dogs. One dog is nationally certified (NASAR) as a live-find area search dog. Leika--she's a Border Collie--will search for and locate any live human she encounters when deployed. Because she is a detection dog, she almost always encounters human odor before she "pinpoints" the human's location. When Leika encounters "target odor" (live human scent), she will trace the odor in to its source, then run back to me and perform her Trained Final Response (TFR). Leika's TFR is to jump up on me with her two front paws. After doing this (quite happily I might add), Leika then returns to the human she's found, then back to me, then back to the human, etc. This is called a "Recall-Refind" behavior. My second dog, Madilyn, is currently a pup still. She's in training to become a human remains detection dog. This will take at least another year because we will be certifying at the level of industry standards by using NAPWDA as a certifying organization. For the time being, Maddie is (also quite happily) engaging with me on the journey of becoming a mission-ready K9 team of our own.
I travel. A lot. I can generally be found somewhere in New Mexico or in southwestern Colorado. I have the privilege of knowing and training with a great many capable handlers and trainers across this region and so I try to take advantage of any opportunities to learn and improve my performance as a handler. When I'm not working on my academic research or working dogs (not necessarily in that order), I enjoy exploring topographic maps and country that is new to me. I also enjoy perusing academic research on canine cognition as it applies to the detection dog industry. I strive for perfection and that means giving 100% of my effort as a researcher, a handler, and a human being privileged to play with some really fun working dogs!
