weird science

My new temporary home is the NIU cognitive lab.

Seriously. I live here.
A week from tomorrow I will be giving my first talk based on my OWN RESEARCH THAT I DID ALMOST ENTIRELY BY MYSELF.
Naturally, I'm really excited :) and this has been months in the making, but I'm finally ready to talk about my graduate advisor's brilliant idea that I took and ran furiously with.

Really...I'm pretty out of breath!

But in order to present research I need actual data. And unlike a chemistry or biology lab, psychological data usually needs to be collected by scheduling individual session in which people come into the lab and do your experiment, and then learn all about why you made them jump through your ridiculous hoops. Seriously, I really envy those whose data comes from a bunch of cell cultures and fruit flies sometimes.

So that's where I am right now... for hours all week I have been greeting participants, explaining the tasks they will be doing, and debriefing them on why I had them do what they did.

I wonder sometimes what participants are thinking when they are completing some of these tasks, because they vary from extremely boring to completely ridiculous! So for your enjoyment, I will explain a couple of methods of cognitive experiments so show you what I mean.

In one experiment in perceptual research, psychologists had participants come into the lab and put on a pair of virtual reality goggles. The goggles were designed either to present the viewer with smooth visual input to simulate moving through space, or simply give them a fixed visual perspective. To make this study even more weird, the researchers had the participants walk on a treadmill for an extended period of time while they were wearing these goggles. Now, the researchers had a perfectly good reason for doing this. They wanted to manipulate the visual input that people were getting as they experienced walking...essentially confusing the perceptual system into either believing the person is putting in the regular amount of effort for walking and moving an equivalent amount of space, or putting in effort for walking and not being able to move anywhere. This has been shown to influence how people perceive distances. But wouldn't this be a weird study to participate in? You want me to do what?

In another study, participants had to watch a feature length movie about a balloon twice in row. This was actually a study I helped collect data on a year ago, and let me tell you -- this movie was not enjoyable the first time around, so you can only imagine how terrible it is after the second time..and the 100th time (seriously, I've seen this film over 100 times now). Anyway, the study had participants watch this film twice in a row and press a button every time they perceive a unit of meaningful activity. What does that even mean? It's totally up to interpretation. Not kidding, the participants essentially don't get any further instruction!

In yet another study, participants had to judge the distance of their body to a very large and threatening spider.
...I can't make this stuff up.

Psychologists are weird.