Experiment.
I am NEVER taking another summer course again. We have one quarter left in the semester. That's two weeks! The class goes by so fast, there's no time to stop and smell the psychology.
We broke into groups and had to design and execute an experiment on some aspect of memory. I had a really good idea at first, but it was not something that we could have done easily. We designed the experiments on Tuesday and did them on Wednesday.
My idea was that since memory is a reconstructive process, people will know the main/important points of an event, and when asked to recall it later will fill in the details using their own logic and common sense about human nature. Based on this, if we had our subjects in a room and exposed them to a very out of the ordinary event (a streaker, or something) but had our cohorts be in the room and not react the way people would normally react, when asked about it later, the subject would report the incident (including the reaction of others) as it would make sense to the subject, not how it actually happened.
It's one of the reasons eyewitness testimony is so unreliable, humans are story tellers and when they can't remember how things exactly went they'll 'fill in the blanks.' Just imagine a bank robbery. You would assume everyone not in a mask holding a gun would be innocent bystanders, but the guy in the mask is the one you are paying attention to. Meanwhile his partner could be the one actually carrying out the robbery, unnoticed by anyone. Later witnesses would report that the partner was cowering in the corner like everyone else, just because that's what would make the most sense to the witnesses.
You can see why this experiment would have been hard to carry out; especially with the limited time we had to design it.
We decided to experiment to see the effect of colour on memory. I cut and pasted a bunch of photographs of objects onto a while background and printed it off in colour and black & white. The subjects had 1 minute and 30 seconds to view the page of the pictures, then we took the page away and they had a minute and 30 seconds to write down as many objects as they could remember.
We had one subject who view the black & white who saw more than any other person, but even with her score added in the people viewing colour's scores added up to 100, the black and white was 92. That's not a statistically significant amount, so our hypothesis was not supported by the experiment. Just for kicks our Instructor told us to replace that freakishly high score with the mean for the black & white group. Our results were significant then.
It was a freakishly high score, she remembered 21 objects. There were only 28 on the page and the highest score after her was 18 (a colour score.) The highest black & white score after her was 15. Our lowest score of the day was 9 (black & white.)
Now I have a report over the experimant to write, it's due Tuesday.
This weekend I'm going to the Science Museum to see the exibit of bodies. It's part of my birthday celebration.
We broke into groups and had to design and execute an experiment on some aspect of memory. I had a really good idea at first, but it was not something that we could have done easily. We designed the experiments on Tuesday and did them on Wednesday.
My idea was that since memory is a reconstructive process, people will know the main/important points of an event, and when asked to recall it later will fill in the details using their own logic and common sense about human nature. Based on this, if we had our subjects in a room and exposed them to a very out of the ordinary event (a streaker, or something) but had our cohorts be in the room and not react the way people would normally react, when asked about it later, the subject would report the incident (including the reaction of others) as it would make sense to the subject, not how it actually happened.
It's one of the reasons eyewitness testimony is so unreliable, humans are story tellers and when they can't remember how things exactly went they'll 'fill in the blanks.' Just imagine a bank robbery. You would assume everyone not in a mask holding a gun would be innocent bystanders, but the guy in the mask is the one you are paying attention to. Meanwhile his partner could be the one actually carrying out the robbery, unnoticed by anyone. Later witnesses would report that the partner was cowering in the corner like everyone else, just because that's what would make the most sense to the witnesses.
You can see why this experiment would have been hard to carry out; especially with the limited time we had to design it.
We decided to experiment to see the effect of colour on memory. I cut and pasted a bunch of photographs of objects onto a while background and printed it off in colour and black & white. The subjects had 1 minute and 30 seconds to view the page of the pictures, then we took the page away and they had a minute and 30 seconds to write down as many objects as they could remember.
We had one subject who view the black & white who saw more than any other person, but even with her score added in the people viewing colour's scores added up to 100, the black and white was 92. That's not a statistically significant amount, so our hypothesis was not supported by the experiment. Just for kicks our Instructor told us to replace that freakishly high score with the mean for the black & white group. Our results were significant then.
It was a freakishly high score, she remembered 21 objects. There were only 28 on the page and the highest score after her was 18 (a colour score.) The highest black & white score after her was 15. Our lowest score of the day was 9 (black & white.)
Now I have a report over the experimant to write, it's due Tuesday.
This weekend I'm going to the Science Museum to see the exibit of bodies. It's part of my birthday celebration.