My friend in France sent me this story from Process Alimentaire and my best friend translated it.

Stephane Desaulty, a PhD student at CLLE-LTC University of Toulouse 2 is undertaking a thesis in cognitive psychology to increase the efficiency of good hygiene training in catering. It is reinforced by scientific expertise in food safety from the School of Industrial Biology (EBI).

Silliker is funding the research. For the consulting, auditing and analysis firm, part of Mérieux Nutrisciences this thesis is an opportunity "to identify new avenues for training."

The base for this research is in "fuzzy trace” theory. According to its inventors, experiences are simultaneously stored in our memory in two forms: first traces representing the details of events and also traces representing their general meaning. As such, this theory demonstrates that as expertise increases, the mental representation of risk does not become more complex. Quite the contrary, when making a decision the trained people would not rely on details, as would the novices, but rather on simple mental representations.

The thesis will focus on analyzing the memory representations in reasoning and decision making in a professional context as well as on analyzing possible differences between "experts" and novices. The goal? To identify the strengths and weaknesses of training programs. In the short term, this research should measure the suitability of proposed training and develop new learning tools.