Caleb Cohen

Caleb Cohen is a Human Factors Scientist in MEA Forensic’s Los Angeles office. He investigates human behavior in the context of damage or injury-producing events. Often, these events are motor vehicle accidents, and Caleb assesses how drivers, pedestrians, cyclists, motorcyclists and other road users responded, or failed to respond. His casework includes measuring environmental conditions such as illuminance, luminance, and sound levels to evaluate nighttime visibility, siren audibility, perception-response time, and gap acceptance. The results of Caleb’s analyses help with liability assessments.

Caleb earned a Bachelor of Science in Cognitive Science from Yale University, and a Master of Science in Human Factors from California State University, Long Beach. His study of cognitive science, which explores how people perceive and respond to the physical world, led him to human factors and its application to vehicle safety. He has tested how drivers react at night, and during takeover requests in semiautonomous vehicles. “Today’s vehicles are computers on wheels,” he explains. “When they crash, we need to understand which features the driver had available, which were active, and how they changed the driver’s interaction with their vehicle.” Caleb is active in MEA’s current research into how drivers adapt to one-pedal driving in electric vehicles.

Caleb believes the courts, and MEA’s clients, are best served by understanding all sides of a particular case. “I take a deep dive into the incident to study how each human factor may have affected the outcome,” he says. “I anchor my findings to the peer-reviewed literature most relevant to the case to ensure my conclusions withstand the most rigorous scrutiny.”