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Expand Your Mind |
Did most of your answers follow the "WABTA" bias pattern? If so, remember, it is possible that you are indeed "above average" in how concerned you are about these various issues. What we really need to do is to examine the responses of the entire class (as we did during the first lecture) to see if "most students" think they are "above average." Although this exercise examined only your individual answers, the data presented in the pie charts illustrate that a WABTA bias typically occurs for these types of questions....at least in Western societies.
If your answers did not follow the WABTA pattern, is it possible that your responses were influenced by learning about the WABTA bias in class?
Finally, if you're motivated, you might have a few friends perform this activity and then see if they consider themselves "above average" too.
Please Evaluate Activity #1, "Causes for Concern" (1 minute online survey).
Activity #2: Rate the Celebrities, Follow Up
If your results are like those of most students, you probably found a positive correlation between how attractive you rated the various people and how positively you rated most (but perhaps not all) of their other qualities. This activity shows how we can gather correlational data from just one person (i.e, you). Of course, if this were an actual research project, we would want to get a larger sample of participants!.
Please Evaluate Activity #2, "Rate the Celebrities" (1 minute online survey).
Activity #3: What Do You Really Mean By That?, Follow Up
Suppose I want to test a hypothesis: "People's reaction time to a moving target will be slower than their reaction time to a fixed target." Then I go ahead and test it using the two reaction time tasks that you just performed. Almost everyone has a slower reaction time to the moving target (if your's wasn't, was it because you "jumped the gun" a lot and responded even before the green ball appeared. In other words, did you make more errors with the green ball!)
To conduct
a proper experiment, I would need to eliminate the following confounds:
1) the color of the "target" balls was different (it should
be the same);
2) one task had audio sounds and the other didn't (either both should,
or better yet, neither should);
3) the size of the target ball changed from trial to trial on the moving
task, but was always the same on the fixed target (the size of the moving
and fixed targets should be the same).
4) the "wait time" before the ball appeared varied considerably
for the moving target, but was constant for the fixed target (the time
interval should be the same for the fixed and moving targets).
5.) the key that you pressed in order to respond was not the same key
for the two tasks (it would be best to use the space bar for both tasks).
Finally,
even if I corrected for all of these sloppy procedures, I still have one
problem. If you respond more quickly to the fixed target, maybe it is
because you have had practice with the moving target first. I can correct
this problem in one of two ways:
1) Randomly assign half of my participants to perform the moving task,
whereas half of them do the fixed task. In this case, each person just
does one type of task, and then I compare the results from the two groups.
2) Randomly assign half my participants to perform the moving task first
and then the fixed task, whereas the other participants perform the fixed
task first and then the moving task. This way, each person does both tasks
(like you did) but the practice effects will "balance out" over
my entire sample of participants.
Please
Evaluate Activity #3, "What Do You Really Mean "
(1 minute online survey).
Activity #5 Follow-Up: Nautilus
PRISM describes this exercise as a test of "concept formation" (which is one type of learning, i.e., learning concepts). In case you found the information at the end of this activity confusing (i.e., the description of typical "concept formation experiments"), don't worry; the Nautilus activity provides some simple lessons about learning.
1. Trial and Error: This is a basic form of learning but often it is inefficient. In this case, if you just clicked on the various cues without keeping track or formulating a plan, odds are you ran into lots of dead ends and were not able to escape the maze quickly.
2. Assuming that you were able to identify all 5 cues, the most logical way to find your way out was to test each cue one at a time until such time as your either escaped or ran into a dead end. Upon reaching a dead end, you rule out the cue. This way, one by one, you eventually discover the right answer (Unfortunately, in my own case, I didn't realize that sound was a cue...I was too focused on the visual cues: color, blinking, etc. And, I started thinking about combinations of cues, e.g., "maybe it's yellow objects but only when they blink," which made the task more complex than it needed to be).
3. How well do you think a cat, or a dog, or a chimpanzee would perform at this task? Might this task be one way to examine the cognitive learning abilities of other species? If the average chimpanzee could solve this as quickly as the average human, what might that tell us?
4. From a strict behaviorist point of view, your responses were being shaped by positive reinforcement (choosing a direction that had a positive consequence of leading further through the maze) and punishment (choosing a direction that led to a dead-end). To a cognitive psychologist, this positive and negative feedback was helping you test hypotheses and form a concept about which cue was the correct one.
5. Lastly: Chapter 6 ends by talking about language as perhaps the most efficient of all learning mechanisms -- at least across most situations. Case in Point: How long would it have taken you to get out of the maze if, before doing it, I simply had told you: "Listen to the background sounds; they either "go up" or "go down" in their pitch. Make your decision to go left or right based on the type of sound! Ignore all the other cues." I'll bet that you would have found your way out of the maze a lot more quickly than you actually did!
Please
Evaluate Activity #5, "Nautilus " (1 minute online
survey).
Activity #6 Follow-Up: The Serial Position Effect
Did your answers fit the typical serial position pattern? If they didn't, several factors might have caused this.
1. Unfortunately, on task 1, three of the four nonsense syllables that came in the middle of this list -- "PON," "YUL," and "BAS" -- may have been easier to remember because they are similar to 4-letter words that have meaning -- Pons, Yule, Bass. Only one other word on the list, ROP, has this characteristic (i.e., rope). For me, I know that the word PON caught my special attention because it triggered an association the PONS in the brain. On Task 2, all the words had meaning, so this was not a problem on the second task.
2. You knew what the pattern of results was supposed to look like before completing this task. Even if you did this task before we covered it in class and before reading the textbook pages, the first part of the activity described the serial position effect -- and showed a graph of it -- before you performed the task. In some cases, once people know that the middle words are supposed to be the most poorly recalled, they may pay extra attention to those words! If I were designing this task, I'd have had you do the task right away and described the typical pattern afterwards!! (In that case, I'd also would have asked you to perform it before reading the text and attending the class lectures on memory.)
You might try adminstering this memory task to a friend or family member who is unfamiliar with this topic. Just make sure that they are looking away from the screen at first, so that you can click past the opening frames where they show the serial position graph. Then, have them look at the screen that begins the task (the one that says TRY IT in the upper left) and have them click "begin" when they are ready.
Please
Evaluate Activity #6, "Serial Position Effect" (1
minute online survey).
Activity #7 Follow-Up: Iconic Memory
Did your results fit the typical iconic memory pattern? When I took this test, I usually was able to remember 6 to 8 letters without the tone, which is more than the participants in the original experiment. One key difference between the task you just completed and Sperling's original study is that, for you, each matrix of letters was up on the screen for about 1 second. In the original study, they were flashed on the screen for only 1/20 of a second! Thus, you had 5 times as long to look at all the letters, and this would produce the biggest advantage in the situation without the tone (i.e., with the tone, most people can remember 3 or 4 letters per row anyway, even at a 1/20 exposure, so increasing the exposure to 1 second doesn't add that much).
Even if your results did not come out the typical way, this activity does a good job of showing you the basic procedure that Sperling used, especially with regard to how the tones were used to signal participants as to which row they should recall.
Please Evaluate Activity #7, "Serial Position Effect" (1 minute online survey).
Because we spend so much of our time in the presence of other people, TRUST becomes an important part of the human equation. If the "peanut game" actually were for real -- using REAL MONEY-- your ability to form accurate impressions about the other people (let's assume that they are strangers) would be critical. Will these people be selfish, trying to maximum their own individual gain? Even if everyone can agree on a strategy at the start -- "Let's not take any peanuts so that the amount will really grow fast, and then we'll share them all equally" -- can you trust them to keep their word? Will one person play along for several rounds, letting the amount of nuts accumulate rapidly, and then betray everyone else by taking them all?
How do we judge whether to trust others? In a game like this, what people say might provide one clue, but no doubt we would look at other people's behavior as the best clue. Well, remember that you were the first person to select the nuts on each round. So, if other people were observing your behavior, what impression would they form? Would they think that you were behaving selfishly, or instead, would they think that you were trustworthy?
Also realize how this type of situation can rapidly become a self-fulfilling phrophecy. Suppose that the other people initially had decided, on their own (no communication), to not take any nuts so that the amount of nuts would double on each round. However, suppose that you begin by assuming that the other people "will be looking out for themselves." Thus, on the first round you take a few nuts, or perhaps many nuts, so that you are guaranteed of some money. In response to your behavior, the others might reasonably change their minds and conclude that they better take some nuts immediatelytoo. Now, after you see them take the nuts, you conclude "See, I was right. These other people are just looking out for themselves." In short, your own behavior triggers their response, and their response ends up confirming your initial impression...a classic self-fulfilling prohphecy!
Please Evaluate Activity #10, "Nuts" (1 minute online survey).
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Psych101B Fall 2000 Copyright © 2000 The University of Washington. All rights reserved.