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Project

The goal of this project is to explore human sensation and perception by conducting a small-scale experiment. There are many areas of sensation and perception that can be investigated, and assigned readings and class lectures provide an indication of the kinds of tasks that would be appropriate to investigate. In designing the experiment, you should not feel that you need to conduct a completely novel experiment. It is perfectly OK to base your experiment directly on previous work and, for example, to make a change to the experimental materials that potentially offers some additional understanding of the relevant issues.

Steps in Conducting the Project

  1. Ideally, you do the project in a group of two to four students, though you may do the project alone. The first step is to form a group (or not) and then to pick a topic and begin to formulate an experimental plan.
  2. Your group should find an article that describes the phenomena in which you are interested. You need to give a brief presentation to the class on what the article is about and why it is interesting.
  3. The next step is to submit the form requesting approval for the use of human participants to your instructor. The form must have my approval before data collection can begin. In addition to addressing ethical issues, the approval form will require a preliminary statement of the hypothesis that your experiment tests, how your experiment will be conducted, and what human participants will be asked to do. Thus, the approval form also serves as an experiment plan for your project. See Human Participation Procedure.
  4. The next step is to set up your experiment.
  5. The project should be written as a paper. Writing on the Introduction and Discussion of the project should be done individually and should not be done in collaboration with other members of your group. The Method and Results sections may be shared. The write-up should cite original research literature and have a complete reference section.

The write-up for the project is due on the date indicated on the schedule. The experiment plan/human participation procedure for your project is due two weeks before the project is due.

How to Implement Your Experiment and Collect your Data

Your choice of topic will be limited by your ability to conduct your experiment. Some topics are effectively off limits due to a combination of ethical and practical concerns, so for example you cannot do an experiment such as single-cell recording (because it is invasive and because the facilities are not available) or an experiment that involves a vulnerable population such as children, individuals with pathology, or older adults.  I expect that in almost every case you will test college students.  Besides their availability, testing college students has advantages; they are used to following instructions and generally try to do well at tasks. This means that using them is a good place to start and can even sustain a career of research.

Some topics that are in principle fine for the class may turn out to be problematic for practical reasons, either it would take too long to test the number of participants needed, the data analysis is too complex, or implementing the experimental procedure is too difficult. Here, I focus on some tools that you can use to implement the experimental procedure.  There are many tools available online and I will not try to cover all of them.  It you find a tool that works for your experiment you should definitely use it.

  • Tools designed for running psychology experiments. These programs often contain experiments on different topics that can be modified.
  • Using general purpose tools for stimulus presentation:
    • Powerpoint. Powerpoint can be used for simple presentation of stimuli where participants’ responses are collected with pen and paper.  There is some capability within powerpoint for controlling the timing of transitions between slides in a display.

Sources on Research Methods

Knowledge Base on Conjointly 

Project Write-Up

The paper should be a report of your groups project and results. It should include the following: Title page, introduction, method, results, discussion, and reference list. The paper should follow APA style (APA Style Official Website).  The write-up is both a group effort and an individual effort.

  • Group part:  All members of a group may turn in the same Methods, Results, Tables and Figures.  That is, you may work together on the methods and results and if you want you can turn in the same text. The length of this section will be determined by the complexity of your methods and results. It is important to be concise.
  • Individual part: Each member of a group must write an their own introduction and discussion of the project. You should include one or two references to relevant literature and should discuss how your research is related to issues that arise from those articles.  You may of course include more than that number of references but that is not necessary.  The goal of this project is to learn about how empirical research is conducted. While ultimately what is important is what you write, I know that students like to get some sense of how long a paper should be. A good introduction and discussion for this paper could be written in about 3 single-spaced pages.

Introduction

In the introduction, you should describe the purpose of the experiment. This should have something to do with learning about human sensation and perception. A good introduction will make some attempt to describe why it would be important to learn more about such processes. Next, you should discuss the different possible answers to your experimental question. Are there a few different ways that people might engage in perception of the type that you are evaluating?

If the experiment is designed to distinguish between a number of different hypotheses, then you should discuss the different patterns of data that you expect to find under the different hypotheses. In other words, the introduction should make clear predictions about how the data will allow you to distinguish among the alternatives that you are considering. To do this, you obviously must say something about what the effects of some independent variable (e.g., content of problem) might be, and you must say something about what you will be varying in the experiment. For example, you might say something like:

In the present experiment, subjects [whatever they did] for a variety of different [whatever was varied]. If the [such-and-such] possibility is true, then it would be expected that the [dependent variable] would [whatever it would do]. This is because [say why]. Alternatively, if the [so-and-so] hypothesis is true, then the [dependent measure] might [say how the pattern of results might be different].

If there is something else that is being studied in your experiment (e.g., another independent variable) then you should say something about that too:

The present experiment was also designed to assess the impact of [what is being varied] on [what is being measured]. If … then …

Note the general pattern above. By the end of the introduction, the reader should know what you will be varying in your experiment, what you will be measuring, and why the results will help to answer the theoretical questions that you are interested in. Do not include unnecessary information about: the design of the experiment; the particular method/procedure that you’ll use to vary whatever you’re varying; the particular method you’ll use to measure whatever you’re measuring; the specific nature of the stimuli.

Method

In the Procedure subsection, you should describe what happened in the experiment at the level of a TRIAL. If there are places in the sequence of events where different things happened depending on the condition, then say something like: In one-half of the trials the problem was…, in the other half, it was… Be sure to say what the subject was supposed to do: The subjects task was to [whatever]. If there was a particular moment when the subject was supposed to respond, be sure to state when that was. Don’t forget to explain what the dependent variable(s) was (were) and how it (they) were measured. By the end of the procedure subsection, the reader should know what all of the independent and dependent variables were, and how they were varied and/or measured.

In the Design subsection, you should describe how all of the different conditions were presented to the subjects. Was this a within-subjects or between-subjects design? How many trials did each subject perform, and in what order?

Results

You should include both descriptive statistics (e.g., means of the various conditions), as well as inferential statistics (statistical comparisons between conditions). It would be difficult to write a good results section for the present lab without some tables and/or figures. Tables and figures must be discussed in the text . For example:

Figure 1 shows the mean [whatever] for each level of [whatever] as a function of [whatever]. The data are plotted separately for the different levels of [whatever]. As can be seen in the figure, mean reaction times were slower when [whatever] [F(x,y) = z, p < .00001]. reaction times did not depend on [whatever] [F(x,y) = z, p < .10].

Discussion

The main purpose of the discussion is to describe how the results helped to answer the questions you raised in the introduction. If the results rule-out some of the alternatives that you were considering you should say that here. Be sure to say what particular aspects of the results allow you to make the conclusions that you are making. Since there presumably was a reason for you to vary all of the things that you varied, you should be sure to discuss what the effects of all of the independent variables were.

Guidelines

The paper is due at the start of class on the designated day and should be submitted electronically in Word to the course Sakai site.

  • Your paper should be single-spaced with one-inch margins.
  • With the exception of citations and references, you do not need to follow APA Format. In particular, while your paper should have a title, it does not need a title page. The title should be placed above the text on the first page and should be centered and capitalized. The first page should also include your name. You do not need to include an abstract.
  • It is important that you cite references properly in the text and that you include complete reference information for any sources that you use at the end of the paper. Please conform to APA style in citations and references. A brief outline of APA style can found on the APA Research Style Crib Sheet.
    • Your references should be at the end of the paper, but do not need to be on a separate page.
    • Your citations should be in APA format. If you want to cite a particular study from a primary source, that you know of only from a secondary source, you should write something like: Smith and Jones (1998, as discussed in Yantis & Abrams, 2016) found… If you use a citation like this, then your reference section should include the reference for both the primary source and the secondary source. You can find the reference for the primary source from the reference section of the secondary source.
  • You are encouraged to have another student in the class read your paper and provide feedback, although this is not required. If you do so, make sure to include an acknowledgment section at the end of your paper (e.g., I would like to thank John Doe for helpful comments on a draft of this paper).

 

Group Presentation

You should give a brief presentation (MAXIMUM of 10 MINUTES) of your project to the class. Keep the following in mind as you prepare for the presentation:

  •  The presentation should follow roughly the structure of your written report, that is you what the issue was, what you did, what you found and what you learned from the project.
  • You should make a powerpoint to accompany your experiment. In making the powerpoint, it is important to remember the following:
    • Do not put a lot of text on the powerpoint, make your points with graphics, tables, pictures and bulleted text.
    • An important part of communicating about your project is conveying what you did.  Your powerpoint should illustrate what a trial was like in the experiment.
  • Each member of the group should present some part of the project. It is a very good idea to practice your presentation together before the presentation to the class.

Evaluation

  • 15% Peer Evaluation
  • 25% Experiment
  • 20% Write-up of Methods and Results
  • 20% Presentation
  • 20% Individual write-up of Introduction and Discussion