• Spatial Cognition
• Cognitive Neuroscience
• Applied Cognitive Psychology
• Visual Memory
• Human Factors
• GoCognitive.net Educational Website Development

Steffen Werner received his undergraduate and graduate education in mathematics and experimental psychology at the University of Goettingen, Germany.  As a post-doctoral researcher at Prof. Molly Potter’s lab at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology he investigated visual attention and memory.  After his return to the University of Goettingen, Steffen worked on questions related to human spatial cognition and navigation.  In 2000, he joined the University of Idaho’s department of psychology and its human factors graduate program.  His main current research interests focus on both applied questions like the design of in-car map displays and graphical password systems and basic questions regarding the capacity of human visual memory.  Over the last few years, Steffen Werner and a group of motivated undergraduate students have worked to create the website www.gocognitive.net, which is intended to provide educational resources for educators and students in the field of cognitive neuroscience.

• Johnson, K. & Werner, S. (2008). Graphical User Authentication – A comparative evaluation of Composite Scene Authentication (CSA) vs. three competing graphical passcode systems (Passfaces, VIP, PassPoints). In Proceedings of the 52nd annual meeting of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society.  Baltimore, MD.
• Jacobson, J. & Werner, S. (2004). Why cast shadows are expendable: Insensitivity of human observers and the inherent ambiguity of cast shadows in pictorial art. Perception, 33, 1369-1383.
• Werner, S. & Schindler, L.E. (2004).  Misaligned local reference systems in floorplan layout impair wayfinding performance. Environment & Behavior. 36, 461-482. 
• Werner, S. and Diedrichsen, J. (2002). The time course of spatial memory distortions. Memory & Cognition, 30(5), 717-729. 
• Werner, S. and Thies, B. (2000). Is “change blindness” attenuated by domain-specific expertise? An expert-novices comparison of change detection in football images. Visual Cognition, 7, 163-173. 
• Werner, S. and Schmidt, K. (1999). Environmental reference systems for large-scale spaces. Spatial Cognition and Computation, 1(4), 447-473.

• Development of www.gocognitive.net, an online educational resource for cognitive neuroscience.  Werner, S. (2010, PI). GoCognitive – Online Teaching Tools for Cognitive Neuroscience Education.  National Science Foundation Division of Undergraduate Education: Course, Curriculum and Laboratory Improvement Program: Phase 1 (Three years - $199,396).
• Research on the capacity of visual short-term memory.  Ongoing experiments with the help of undergraduate students to determine the amount of information remembered after short visual presentation of simple stimuli.
• Research on the use of graphical authentication systems (graphical passwords) in computing applications.  Development and evaluation of the Composite Scene Authentication System (CSA).